Due to the increasing prevalence of tablets in families, tablets have become a major platform for computer play for pre-school children. While children may potentially learn great deal from tablet play, it is at present unclear to what extent tablets support the wide variety of play activities that characterise their play and that form a necessary basis for children's development. This thesis presents the results of a heuristic evaluation, inspecting the play modes that presently are supported by children’s tablet games. The evaluation focused on the extent to which the mode of play was designed to correlate with children’s stage of development. Theoretical models representing the social and cognitive stages of play were used to examine all tablet games, examining how they support solitary play, parallel play, group play, functional play and dramatic play. The results show that for most of the investigated games, the age declaration correlates with their supported mode of play. More specifically, the investigated games supported solitary play, group play, functional play, constructive play and dramatic play in ways that were appropriate for their target age. However, none of the games supported parallel play, which is an important play form for children between 2 to 3 years old. Furthermore, very few games supported group play and constructive play. The conclusion is that while tablet game designers seem to understand and acknowledge the cognitive development of their target users, they pay less attention to the social modes of play corresponding to children's development stages.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-266855 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Gadima, Nur |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media, Uppsala University |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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