Educational toy | EPFL Graph Search

Educational toys (sometimes also called "instructive toys") are objects of play, generally designed for children, which are expected to stimulate learning. They are often intended to meet an educational purpose such as helping a child develop a particular skill or teaching a child about a particular subject. They often simplify, miniaturize, or even model activities and objects used by adults. Although children are constantly interacting with and learning about the world, many of the objects they interact with and learn from are not toys. Toys are generally considered to be specifically built for children's use. A child might play with and learn from a rock or a stick, but it would not be considered an educational toy because

it is a natural object, not a designed one, and
it has no expected educational purpose. The difference lies in perception or reality of the toy's intention and value. An educational toy is expected to educate. It is expected to instruct, promote intellectuality, emotional or physical development. An educational toy should teach a child about a particular subject or help a child develop a particular skill. More toys are designed with the child's education and development in mind today than ever before. Toys have changed substantially throughout history, as has the concept of childhood itself. In Toys as Culture (1986), anthropologist Brian Sutton Smith discusses the history of toys and states that "in multifarious ways toys are mediating these cultural conflicts within the personal lives of children". Educational toys in particular tend to reflect the cultural concerns of their time. Research on the history of toys and their use tends to focus on western cultures, but work has also been done on North Africa and the Sahara. Puppets or dolls made of wood, clay, wax or cloth may be the earliest known toys. Archaeologists have found them in sites from Egypt, Greece and Rome, and Antonia Fraser emphasizes their universality.

Unobtrusively Regulating Children’s Posture via Slow Visual Stimuli on Tablets

Pierre Dillenbourg, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, Chenyang Wang, Barbara Bruno

Children’s retention of a proper body posture while interacting with educational tablet applications is important for both their physical health and task performance. In this work, we propose a new approach to unobtrusively induce postural changes in child ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

OSSCAR, an open platform for collaborative development of computational tools for education in science

Giovanni Pizzi, Sara Bonella, Dou Du

In this paper we present the Open Software Services for Classrooms and Research (OSSCAR) platform. OSSCAR provides an open collaborative environment to develop and access educational resources in the form of web applications, for which various deployment m ...

ELSEVIER2023

Reinforcement learning approach to control an inverted pendulum: A general framework for educational purposes

Jesus Sanchez Rodriguez

Machine learning is often cited as a new paradigm in control theory, but is also often viewed as empirical and less intuitive for students than classical model-based methods. This is particularly the case for reinforcement learning, an approach that does n ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023