This paper reports an ongoing study, linked with qualitative research methods and an inductive perspective, on how we can make learning enjoyable for children with severe intellectual disabilities. The teacher interviews mainly focused on the potential of educational apps such as Specual iApps for playful learning with relatively little consideration on technical considerations. The Template Analysis revealed 9 broad themes including Engagement, Fun, Playfulness, Attraction or Appeal, Assessment, Ease of Use, Personalized Learning, Accessibility/ Interactivity, and Reduced Disruptive Behaviour. Based on the analysis of the results and their implications, the paper provides a series of recommendations and directions that can be used as a reference among the software developers and designers to create educational apps for children with complex needs offering real educational value.

The use of interactive, smart and connected toys is expected to increase rapidly with many claiming not only new ways to play, but also to have educational benefits. However, there is a lack of evidence to support such claims and the purpose of the current analysis was to gather expert opinion about interactive toys for play and learning. In-depth interviews with 15 experts from technology corporates, stakeholder organizations and academia using a semi-structured interview protocol were conducted. The audio transcripts were coded using a Template Analysis approach with the key themes being educational utility, learning, play, and children with disabilities. The text visualization revealed that experts perceived high educational effectiveness of interactive toys. Apart from the educational value, experts also spoke about the benefits of interactive toys in entertaining the children of busy parents, privacy, security and integrative features of smart toys. This study demonstrates that for experts’ interactive toys have higher perceived educational value than traditional toys or other forms of play although this is an intuition or an insight rather than based on direct evidence to support this view. From the analysis and interpretation, we identified three main recommendations (1) the need for interactive toys to provide a safe, secure and private way to play and learn; (2) increased research, experimentation and investigation to explore interactive toy claims and potential; and (3) increased interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration and innovation.

With the dominant trope of the computer as adversary rather than enabler, reinforcement learning for games has mainly focused on the ability of agents to compete and win. Although cooperation is a product of learning, of understanding the player’s requirements and applying agents’ competences to fulfil them, there has been little investigation of reinforcement learning for cooperation in games. Reinforcement learning results in the agent adapting and changing, however, there are concerns that such adaptivity could alienate users if their cooperative agent outperforms them. To explore this, the paper outlines the development and training of cooperative agents reporting users’ positive response to adaptive cooperation in games.

Abstract In response to the pandemic, many countries have had multiple lockdowns punctuated by partial freedoms limiting physically being together. In 2020–2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, parents were stressed and exhausted by the challenges of work, home schooling, and barriers to typical childcare arrangements. Children were missing one another, their social lives, and the variety of experiences that the world beyond the home brings. Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) offers tried and tested ways to enable children to maintain beyond-household family activities and dynamics. However, it is not viewed as a solution. Instead, as demonstrated through a multiple method study involving a Rapid Evidence Assessment, workshops with 91 teenagers, interviews with 15 experts, a Delphi study with 21 experts, 402 parent questionnaires pre-pandemic, 232 parent questionnaires during the pandemic, and longitudinal interviews with 13 parents during the first UK lockdown in 2020, IVR is not viewed as having value in the home beyond gaming. Results highlight limited consideration of IVR as a way to enhance family life or the home, with a lack of evidence and direction from current research, innovation, and policy. The article empirically demonstrates that experts, teenagers, and parents have limited expectations for VR. Further, with parental resistance to adoption and a lack of ideas or innovations in how IVR could be used, the likelihood of VR-headset adoption remains low as does its potential as a means of educating, entertaining, and socially engaging children and teenagers.