Digital play and technical code: what new knowledge formations are possible?

Digital play is a pedagogical construct used in early childhood to explain young children’s engagement with technologies. Digital play draws upon theories of play to explain young children’s learning with technologies. This paper proposes the further development of digital play by examining how the digital aspect of digital play may also be interpreted. This is achieved using the notion of technical code from critical constructivism to show how historically-valued knowledge shapes technology use in practice. Technical code illustrates how alternative knowledge sources can be used to remediate technological understandings in practice, known in sociocultural terms as new knowledge formations.