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This chapter explores the metaphor of the playground as an open space in which young children can play safely on their own or with peers, without constant supervision and adult engagement. It contrasts the playground experience with the metaphor of the playpen as a confined space that offers constrained choices and limited space for experimentation. It examines how both playgrounds and playpens are designed to meet and promote developmental milestones specific to the pre-school years. Building on this metaphor, the chapter explores the available programs and software for young children aged 2-5 through the lens of designed play spaces. Digital playgrounds offer open exploration and allow children to create, rather than consume. In these technological spaces, children can use their imaginations and learn new skills, taking risks that positively impact their development.

In recent years, a growing number of educators and psychologists have expressed concern that computers are stifling children's learning and creativity and engaging children in mindless interaction and passive consumption. They have a point: today, many computers are used in that way. But that should not be the case. This chapter presents an alternate vision of how children might use computers more like paintbrushes and less like television, opening new opportunities for children to playfully explore, experiment, design, and invent. Illustrative examples are presented to provoke a rethinking of the roles that computers can play in children's lives: as a form of edutainment that promotes playful learning.

By the 1980s and 1990s, Reagan-era budget cuts and the ongoing professionalization of museum education combined to encourage natural museums, science museums and science centers to share shows, sources of funding, and pedagogical strategies. More and more of the nation’s varied institutions remade themselves into streamlined sites of family “edutainment,” a term contemporaries now used to describe a potent, often commercially-motivated blend of education and entertainment. Although tensions between museums’ public and scientific missions persisted, at the outset of the twenty-first century, the displays of American natural history and science museums no longer functioned as active battlegrounds for competing ideas about what defined a museum and its work. Museums of science and nature had become culturally important sites for informal science, engaging diverse audiences in scientific ideas and ideas about scientific practice and awakening new investment in museums as institutions. As such, they collectively embodied museum professionals’ new vision of effective public science, as well as their shared goal of defending it.

Beyond the rules of specific games and the subjective choices of players that determine how play activities proceed, cultural norms also influence and shape the way people play. Two behavioral characteristics are often recognized as predominant in contemporary Japanese play culture. The first is the prerequisite of a great amount of know-how in order to play well. The second characteristic is the emphasis on highly detailed preformulated forms and patterns of play. Some researchers regard these characteristics as essential and unchanging behavior attributes of the Japanese (play) culture. Chapter four offers a different interpretation, arguing that these characteristics reflect postwar cultural production processes, namely, the influence of the social production of an information-saturated society (jōhō shakai) on the performance of play, as well as the successful implementation of institutional planning and production of a modern leisure culture by inventing traditions within the corporate environment, schools and adults’ education facilities. This chapter also argues that wherever and whenever play is idealized, it has the potential of evolving into a highly aestheticized activity that is complexly organized and sustained by a body of knowledge. As play becomes sophisticatedly structured and formalized, play trajectories, players’ behavior, and potential strategies become predetermined to a large extent. From these highly structured worlds, the “best players” emerge as cultural heroes.

The conclusion advocates for understanding music in terms of interpersonal relationships as much or more than as repertoires of texts with their own cultural meanings. Music should be considered in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of “social capital” in addition to “cultural capital” as it is normally conceived. Children’s in-school media use does not involve the intrusion of foreign consumer culture into education, but rather historically and culturally grounded traditions of peer-cultural solidarity provide a context into which entertainment media practices fit naturally. A seeming opposition between education and consumer culture is in fact a constitutive dialectic, which helps explain the politicization of children’s peer cultural practices in school. Consumer culture represents the extension of dynamics from school into the wider public sphere. The invasion of these practices into schools is only a natural return to original fields of conflict between children and adults.

This chapter explores two video games that feature the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin as the main character: the Japanese role-playing game Eternal Sonata and the mobile game Frederic: Resurrection of Music. The chapter begins by examining three mythic identities that have shaped audience’s understandings of Chopin and his music and that play a role in Eternal Sonata and Frederic: the salon composer, the Romantic composer, and the Slavic composer. To address the challenges of creating a compelling video game narrative about a real-world composer, both games employ innovative but problematic narrative strategies to transform Chopin into a more stereotypically heroic character. Moreover, both games include his music in ways designed to reinforce its musical greatness and increase the music’s appeal to younger audiences.

This chapter addresses the ways in which classical music lends itself to gamification, a pervasive trend in contemporary culture in which aspects of games are applied to non-game activities to encourage desired behaviors. The chapter presents two case studies of recent mobile applications that illustrate different approaches to the gamification of classical music. The first of these discusses the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, an app that updates traditional, and problematic, approaches to music education, namely, music appreciation. The second case study considers Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, an app that embraces the interactivity of games to blur the lines between education and musical performance.

This book explores the many different ways by which music and the arts present the nature of HIV/AIDS in Africa in moral, social, local, medical, religious, and transnational terms. It investigates events, movements, and works that continually emphasize the reality of “AIDS as human suffering,” along with creative responses as contributions to a humanly organized “epidemic of signification” surrounding HIV/AIDS. It examines the use of music to cope with HIV/AIDS, describes visual approaches to HIV literacy, and considers how individual artists have confronted HIV/AIDS. The book also discusses the use of radio and television as tools for “edutainment” and of local cultural performances as a means to combat HIV/AIDS. Most importantly, it shows how music and other expressive art forms have given rise to a “culture of AIDS” in Africa and became a potent medium through which Africans could create their own social networks, power relationships, and cultural structures to convey messages of hope and healing, as well as knowledge and good counsel, to the wider community.

The chapter discusses which tools can be employed to bring about norm change. It examines the limits of legislative interventions and economic incentives. It thereafter explores the role of the media and collective deliberation in initiating norm change. It identifies the marks of a successful intervention both within media and community deliberation. Along the way, it questions the purported utility of economic incentives for norm change, showing how incentives can backfire. Against the background of this critique, the chapter argues for the centrality of involving the target community in understanding the reasons for abandoning a traditional norm. However, it also raises cautionary flags about the use of deliberative practices in effecting norm change. An integrated approach, operating at the level of media, legal, and communal discussions, is recommended.

This chapter describes a pair of HIV/AIDS edutainment campaigns in Côte d’Ivoire. Though implemented in West Africa, both initiatives were initially researched and financed largely through France-based foundations. The chapter explores the meeting points between the local and international in the implementation of an AIDS-based media campaign, while also offering insight into how these campaigns developed a specifically West African approach to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment starting in the 1990s. For these media campaigns, music emerges as a particularly effective means of interweaving local and international discourses and of expressing edutainment campaign messages in emotionally affective, accessible forms. One of the earliest multipronged, anti-HIV/AIDS initiatives in Francophone Africa was “Chaussez Capote” (“Put on a Condom”), launched in 1991 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The second case study is the Wake Up! Africa campaign, a regional initiative that uses a variety of popular artistic forms to disseminate is message and primarily targets urban youth.