Affective and Bodily Involvement in Children's Tablet Play

The rapid development of tablet applications targeting pre-school children presents us with challenging questions concerning how this age group engages with the applications. We performed a study with a tablet game designed to teach pre-school children about emotions, studying their mode of engagement and their understanding of the game. The purpose of the study was to provide insights into what play activities are encouraged by tablet play. The study showed clearly that even though the interactivity of the game was very limited, the children understood the social and emotional aspects of the game content very well. We also found that the children would sometimes engage affectively and dramatically with the game content; we highlight in particular instances of bodily involvement with the game. We argue that tablet games offer design opportunities for children in this age range that may be less relevant for older children, by taking corporeal play around the tablet into account. While none of the models for computer game-based learning and persuasion that have been proposed in literature constitutes a perfect fit to the behavior observed in our study, we find some resonance in the concept of procedural rhetorics in the way the players' interaction with the game serves to complete a rhetorical argument; in this case the storyline of the game. The children's dramatic involvement may potentially serve to strengthen such arguments.