How Educational Games Can Support Children’s Learning

Play is not only a natural activity that young children enjoy; its ability to support children’s development also makes it an activity with strong educational value. From the perspective of deep learning, high-level play that emphasizes children’s agency, embodied experience, connection to everyday life, cooperation, and reflection closely aligns with the characteristics of deep learning in early childhood.

The transition from lower-level to higher-level play, and from superficial to deeper learning, depends on effective teaching from educators.

How to teach effectively through play is therefore a key issue in supporting deep learning among young children. At its core, this means pursuing a balance between high-quality play and high-quality teaching. It involves understanding how children learn, how teachers teach, and how teacher guidance and children’s play can work together in a harmonious, balanced, and effective way.

Play is a highly valuable form of activity for young children. It means much more than simply having fun; it can also provide an effective pathway to deep learning. Good play naturally creates meaningful situations and problems for children while providing opportunities and space for activity, exploration, experimentation, and cooperation. These experiences can support the development of creativity, practical skills, higher-order thinking, problem-solving abilities, and other deeper forms of learning.

Although play offers many benefits, teachers still need to think carefully about what to do when learning opportunities emerge during play or when children begin to show an interest in learning. Helping play develop toward a higher level, making meaningful learning actually take place, and avoiding situations in which children spend significant time playing without gaining meaningful experiences all require effective teaching.

Deep learning is a meaningful process in which children use knowledge to solve real-life problems. Both play and teaching can create opportunities for learning, but deeper learning is more likely to occur when play and teaching are closely integrated. When teachers can make good use of children’s natural interest in play while also recognizing the right moments and methods for teaching, they can teach more effectively and children can learn more effectively.

Teachers can observe children’s unplanned learning during play while embedding educational intentions into their teaching without taking away the spirit of play. When play and teaching develop together, children’s learning can move toward a deeper level through the combination of playing and teaching.

In practice, teachers should pay attention to children’s interests, wishes, and questions during play and use these observations as a basis for planning and designing teaching activities. They should identify learning as it occurs naturally during play and provide children with meaningful, rich, and supportive experiences. At the same time, teachers should trust children and allow them to participate fully in evaluating their own learning and the learning of their peers.

For example, while blowing bubbles, children may discover that where they hold the material can affect the shape of the bubbles. A teacher can ask questions such as, “How can you make a bubble shaped like an hourglass?” or “How did you do it just now?” These questions encourage children to explain and reflect on what they did during play, share their experiences, and make reasonable connections between their actions and the results they observe.

Teaching can also take on a playful approach. This means looking at play and teaching as interconnected activities and bringing some of the characteristics of play into teaching. A playful approach to teaching can preserve the purposeful value of teaching while also incorporating the basic elements of play, especially enjoyment, participation, and autonomy. Increasing opportunities for play within teaching can create more opportunities for deep learning. At the same time, play should not be used simply for its external benefits. Teaching with a playful approach must still retain the essential characteristics of play.

One way to do this is to use playful forms of interaction, including humor, jokes, imitation, riddles, singing, and clapping games. These forms of interaction create a genuine sense of play and reflect a spirit of equal dialogue. They can engage children more effectively and bring more energy into the learning process. For example, when children are creating movements for a “robot” activity and focus only on their upper-body movements while forgetting to move their legs, the teacher can gently remind them by saying, “I forgot to turn on the robot’s leg switch.” This playful comment can provide a subtle reminder without interrupting the activity.

Another approach is to use games to accomplish teaching tasks. For example, when helping children experience rapid changes in musical melody and rhythm, a teacher can play a game of “Wolf and Sheep.” The teacher can first play the role of the sheep while the children act as wolves. When the music reaches the section designated for the game, the children follow the rhythm to catch the sheep. After playing the game repeatedly and becoming familiar with the music and its rules, the teacher can increase the difficulty by having children play with one another in pairs. Through increasingly challenging games, children can learn about music, express musical emotions, and develop creative ways of responding to music.

Teaching activities can also be infused with the spirit of play. A playful atmosphere can effectively stimulate children’s motivation to learn, while the strong emotional engagement it creates can provide an important source of motivation for deep learning. For example, the noise, excitement, and physical exhilaration found in physical activities, as well as the quiet and focused thinking found in mathematics activities, can both be expressions of the spirit of play. Teachers should pay attention to children’s different states during learning and use the spirit of play to encourage deeper self-challenge. However, children who are deeply engaged in different types of activities should not be judged according to one uniform standard.

Supporting children’s play through teaching does not have to follow one or two fixed methods. In particular, teachers should avoid treating “teaching” as simply another word for “having a class.” Deep learning during play can be encouraged through different forms of teaching and guidance.

Teachers should first develop an awareness of planning for play. High-level play requires teachers to plan intentionally and integrate learning goals into play. To provide games that are interesting, authentic, and purposeful, teachers need to be able to identify which learning goals can be achieved naturally through play. By focusing on these goals, teachers can support and deepen children’s play experiences. For example, they can provide specific materials for children to use or ask carefully timed questions instead of interrupting play with compulsory tasks.

The play environment can also be adjusted to support deep learning. Educational goals can sometimes be achieved indirectly by changing the environment in which children play. Children should continue to have choices and control over their activities. At the same time, the environment reflects the teacher’s educational ideas and serves educational goals while still preserving the basic elements of play.

For example, children in a science area may want to explore how to make an ice cube melt faster. The teacher can provide a variety of materials, such as cotton gloves, magnifying glasses, hammers, containers, warm water, and hot-water bottles. A key can also be frozen inside a block of ice to create an “unlocking” task that gives children a reason to explore how to break through the ice. Although the teacher does not directly participate in the children’s play, the setting of the situation and the materials provided can indirectly influence their actions and increase the possibility of deep learning.

When common problems arise during play or when children encounter topics that are worth exploring, teachers can also organize group discussions and interaction. For example, children may discover that a wall they are building keeps collapsing. The teacher can encourage them to discuss the problem together and express their ideas freely. Why does the wall collapse? Perhaps it is too thin, the building blocks are too heavy, or they have not been arranged neatly. How can the problem be solved? The children may suggest making the wall thicker, using smaller and lighter blocks higher up, aligning the blocks more carefully, or adding supporting corners inside the wall. The discussion is essentially an exploration of stability, even though young children may not have the precise terminology needed to describe the concept. Deep learning has nevertheless already taken place.

Teachers can also influence or guide children’s activities in the moment through direct teaching. They can join children’s games, introduce challenging questions, or offer comments during play to encourage learning to develop more deeply. For example, during a pretend bus game, a teacher might ask, “Why don’t you need to buy a ticket when you get on the bus?” or “What would happen if there weren’t enough seats on the bus?” Questions such as “What if this happened?” or “Is there another way?” can provide children with support for deeper thinking.

Without taking control of the activity, teachers can offer children a possible next step. The greatest challenge of direct teaching is to provide gentle support and encourage children to think rather than simply giving orders and telling them what to do. Teachers should help maintain a direction for children’s learning and encourage it to develop toward a deeper level. Too much guidance, however, can have the opposite effect.