Article from Time Magazine presenting recent study by Tim Glass in American Journal of Preventive Medicine that links presence of green space (read: outdoor time) to physical and mental health. What does this say about the nature of "digital life"? Is "exergaming" all wrong? Also mentions No Child Left Inside Act (2008).
"The Education Arcade explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play. TEA's research and development projects focus both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games, and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players." Newest project is "Caduceus, an online puzzle-adventure game for tweens."
Holy smokes! You use your webcam and objects in your house to play computer games- just check it out! Plus, it's free to download- all you need is windows or linux and a webcam! HA!
As children get older, their reliance on pivots such as sticks, dolls and
other toys diminishes. They have internalized these pivots as
imagination and abstract concepts through which they can understand
the world. "The old adage that children’s play is imagination in action
can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and
schoolchildren is play without action" (Vygotsky, 1978).
Another aspect of play that Vygotsky referred to was the development of
social rules that develop, for example, when children play house and
adopt the roles of different family members. Vygotsky cites an example
of two sisters playing at being sisters. The rules of behavior between
them that go unnoticed in daily life are consciously acquired through
play. As well as social rules the child acquires what we now refer to as
self-regulation.

By entering the playground Vygotsky brought the theory of play and
semiotics closer that it had ever been done before. Since then the
activity of the child can be regarded in various aspects but, as
mentioned above, the perspective of higher mental functions
development will predominate in the present paper.
In his general description of play activity Vygotsky (1989) pointed to the
child’s ability to create a “pretend play” situation, whose source he saw
in the affective area. Emphasising the emotional nature of play, he
argued that at the root of the “pretend play” situation is the tendency to
realise desires that cannot be fulfilled in real activity, thus opening the
way to imagination. In his characteristics of the specificity of intellectual
processes in play activities at the pre-school age, Vygotsky stressed the
possibility of separating the visual field from the field of sense.Â
“As a criterion that would allow to isolate a child’s play activity from a
large group of other forms of the child’s activity it must be assumed
that in playing the child creates “pretend play” situations. This is made
possible on the basis of separating the visual field from the field of
sense, which takes place at the pre-school age.”(Vygotsky, 1995, p.
71).[1]Â
This is by ForceFollow who did Metacognition video. This is his POOL
example, learning how to play pool.
Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.