Section

What play is doing, described as a mechanism rather than as a sentiment

Play as exploration made cheap by the removal of consequence. Unstructured time, boredom, how curiosity is measured in research at all, and what a good children's exhibit gets right.

5 pieces

What play actually does, described as a cognitive process

Play is treated as either sacred or trivial and rarely as a mechanism. Here is what it appears to be doing, in the terms a researcher would use.

Play · Cognition · Exploration

Unstructured play is not idleness, and the pressure to fill it is recent

The unsupervised, unplanned, apparently pointless hour has been squeezed out of childhood by a set of assumptions that do not survive examination.

Play · Time · Childhood

Boredom and what it is for

The state adults are most anxious to eliminate from childhood may be the signal that starts self directed activity. Here is what is known and what is guesswork.

Play · Attention · Motivation

How curiosity gets measured in research at all

Curiosity is invoked constantly in education and is remarkably hard to record. Here is how researchers actually operationalise it, and what each method misses.

Play · Methods · Evidence

What a good children's exhibit does, and why most of them do not

Museums and galleries have spent decades working out how children engage with objects. The best of it is a lesson in attention, and the worst is a button that lights up.

Play · Museums · Design

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