Learning as Play

Principal Investigator: Jacqueline Reed-Walsh, Penn State College of Education
URL: http://sites.psu.edu/play/

Learning as Play is an animated, interactive archive of 17th- to 19th- Century narrative media for and by children.

A movable book is a literacy toy where reading words and looking at pictures becomes a game. Also called mechanical books, or toy books, most movable books look like regular books (or codexes) but some of the words and images are presented by mechanical devices such as a flap, tab, slot, wheel and so on. The reader becomes a player who in order to engage with the story must manipulate the mechanisms to create movement. These may be simple such as the flaps that animate a flap book when they are lifted up to reveal pictures that transform one into another or complex such as the architectural structures hidden in pop-up books that seem to jump out when the pages are turned. In all cases, playfulness, movability and the ability to make changes or transformations are of the essence.