Study by Flynn examines how children play with coding apps

Assistant Professor of Child & Adolescent Development Rachel Flynn recently published a manuscript titled, “Young children's social and independent behavior during play with a coding app: Digital game features matter in a 1:1 child to tablet setting,” in Computers & Education.

The research explored how five-year-olds played with computer coding apps on a tablet in a summer camp setting. Computer coding skills are part of computational thinking and a skill needed for many twenty-first-century careers. While young children are being taught these skills, very little is known about how they engage in the experience.

This descriptive research found that during digital game play, young children spend some of their time playing independently and some of their time collaborating and interacting with their peers, like non-digital play. In addition, the structure of the coding game mattered when it came to learning coding skills. An open-structured (i.e., sandbox) digital game required more sustained attention to result in learning, while a game with structured levels did not.