Conference Proposal: Learning through Play and Imagination

许多研究人员声称，玩耍和想象力的活动导致儿童学习。但这种说法看似简单，但它留下了一系列关于游戏和想象力如何（甚至是否）有效促进学习的关键问题。这些问题包括：游戏学习的过程究竟是如何运作的？游戏或想象场景的哪些维度对儿童的学习特别有效，为什么？孩子们在什么年龄最容易通过游戏和想象力的活动学习什么主题？儿童个体的特征（例如，执行功能，气质）与通过游戏和想象力学习的过程相互作用？整合信息和回答这些问题对于教育工作者和媒体创作者的影响非常重要。为了促进跨学科的讨论，这次为期两天的会议（由儿童发展研究学会共同主办）旨在识别和填补有关儿童从有趣和富有想象力的活动中学习的文献中的空白，在开放性研究问题上建立跨实验室和子学科的合作，并就如何最好地利用这些活动来促进儿童的学习和发展提出以证据为基础的战略建议。通过将传统讲座与互动活动相结合，并积极寻求来自学科和实践领域的参与者（例如，媒体创作，游乐场和玩具设计），本次会议将为与会者提供一个广泛的视野研究，通过游戏和想象力学习，深入研究最佳实践，并明确鼓励合作和规划未来的工作，以回答这一领域的关键开放问题。与会者将离开会议的碎片概念化的想象力和好玩的学习，以及它可以研究和应用的方式。这些对话的结果将通过博客文章、开放获取的论文和公开的小册子广泛传播。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Many researchers have claimed that playful and imaginative activities lead to learning in childhood. But this claim is deceptively simple, and it leaves open a host of critical questions about how (and even whether) play and imagination can effectively promote learning. These questions include: How, exactly, does the process of playful learning work? Which dimensions of play sessions or imagined scenarios are particularly effective for children's learning, and why? Which topics do children learn most readily through playful and imaginative activities, and at what ages? How do characteristics of individual children (e.g., executive function, temperament) interact with the process of learning through play and imagination? Integrating information and and answering these questions are important for the implications they hold for educators and media creators . To stimulate cross-disciplinary discussions, this two-day conference (co-sponsored by the Society for Research in Child Development) aims to identify and fill gaps in the literature on children's learning from playful and imaginative activities, build collaborations across labs and subdisciplines on open research questions, and produce proposals for evidence-based strategies for how these activities can best be used to enhance children's learning and development. By combining traditional talks with interactive activities, and by actively seeking participants both from academic disciplines and practice fields (e.g., media creation, playground and toy design), this conference will give participants a wide view research in learning in and through play and imagination, delve into best practices, and explicitly encourage collaborations and planning for future work to answer crucial open questions in this field. Participants will leave the conference with shard conceptualizations of imaginative and playful learning and the ways it could be researched and applied. The results of these conversations will be widely disseminated through blog posts, open-access papers, and publicly available pamphlets.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.