What Can Play Theory Tell us About Computer Games for Young Children?

Play-based learning is defined as a context for learning through which children organize and make sense of their social worlds, as they interact actively with people, objects and representations. Young children's play allows them to explore, identify, negotiate, take risks and create meaningful ideas. Children who are constantly engaged in play experiences have much more developed memory skills, language development and self-regulation than children who lack the play activity. The purpose of the paper is to find out what the most important factors are for teachers' selection computer programs for kindergarten classroom activities. Whether the factors concern the theory of children's play development? Do kindergarten teachers need the scaffolding program for their choice of computer games for using in the classroom? What should be the essence of the program? Preliminary study made by authors in Russian Federation shows the lack of teacher's computer literacy. This situation leads the absence of computer games or incompetent using them in pedagogical work with children. By studying general characteristics of play we identify the main criteria which can be used for choosing appropriate game for classroom activities. For instance, choosing a game teacher should answer the question, if this computer game allows children to create their own scenarios, rules and characters of the play or if it enables children acting in an imaginary situation? The paper gives an overview of the computer games for preschool children used in Russian kindergartens; it also contains the scaffolding features on using computer games for children's development. It summarized the problems and recommendations to scaffolding process for teachers who are interested in using computer games for effective children's development.