Scaffolded Fantasy Play

An area that interests me from this weeks reading is the intersection of children’s fantasy play and social robots or “smart” toys. Pellegrini makes a strong argument for the importance of interactive fantasy play in the development of children’s ability to communicate abstract, non-obvious concepts. Does a “smart” toy detract from that value? It could do so in one of two ways.

The first being that a “smart” toy is capable of creating and communicating imaginary situations to third parties without the child’s help. While the child could pick up communication skills by mimicking the linguistic structures that the “smart” toy uses. However, this could have several pitfalls. The first being that a “smart” toys script may be, intentionally or not, syntactically or logically flawed. By simply mimicking structure, a child will internalize and employ these same errors. Another downside of children mimicking a “smart” toys response structures is the child could fall into the trap of wrote learning as opposed to gaining a deep conceptual understanding of why a given response is appropriate and complete to some query. We saw in the Hirsh-Pasek reading from last week that the process of abstraction and mapping ideas to symbolic structure, in this case grammatical ones, is the best way to truly learn and understand a concept.

A second area where “smart” toys need to be cautious is the degree of scaffolding they provide to play. Pellegrini points out that scaffolded play is useful in that it allows for multiple parties to immerse themselves in imaginary situations for longer. This is turn induces the practicing of group management skills like cooperation. However, over scaffolding play can be isolating, not requiring the participation of others which largely nullifies the positive incentives that existed for fantasy play in the first place.