This article explores how middle school teachers’ own childhood play memories, particularly those involving handmade toys, can inform the design of playful learning experiences in contemporary classrooms. While play is widely recognized as essential in early childhood education, its relevance in middle school settings is often overlooked. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective, this study involved 39 teachers from four middle schools in India. Data were gathered through qualitative methods, including focus group discussions and a toy-making workshop, where participants reflected on and recreated toys from their childhood. An interactive narrative analysis was applied to capture teachers’ stories, memories, and reflections on play. The findings suggest that childhood play involving readily available materials, such as paper, seeds, and cloth, nurtured creativity and cultural awareness and also carried untapped pedagogical potential. Teachers highlighted how integrating toy-making and memory-based play could support hands-on exploration, scientific reasoning, and social skills such as coordination and teamwork. However, challenges related to curriculum alignment and time constraints were also noted. The study introduces the “Play Memory Cycle” model, which illustrates how teachers can use their own play memories as a pedagogical resource to create play-responsive materials and practices. This model supports a reimagining of middle school education where play is permitted as well as integrated as a meaningful, culturally grounded, and learner-centered approach. © Copyright © 2026 AMLE.

Although play naturally embeds computational thinking (CT) and mathematical learning in early childhood education, designing developmentally appropriate learning activities that purposefully nurture and extend these competencies remains a challenge. This study investigates how young children engage with foundational mathematical and computational concepts through analog (DUPLO®) and digital (Blue-Bot) tools in a play-responsive early childhood education workshop setting. The study adopts a qualitative workshop format aimed at promoting playful exploration and active experimentation, involving eleven 4–5-year-old children and their two teachers. Based on a sociocultural perspective, the findings highlight that mathematics is a human activity embedded in everyday playful practices. In particular, unplugged analog activities, embedded within an open-ended narrative framework, guided and structured the process. Based on these findings, we suggest “computational play” as a framework for developmentally appropriate integration of computational thinking (CT) and mathematics. This framework offers implications for educators seeking to support early CT and mathematical learning in playful, exploratory early childhood education (ECE) environments. © 2025 by the authors.

This paper explores the AI policies, frameworks, and guidelines established by Nordic universities (from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). The Nordic countries share characteristics such as a strong infrastructure supporting educational technology integration. The aim is to find similarities, differences, and gaps between the guidelines of Nordic universities in order to make the guidelines more practical and valuable for teachers and students. The theoretical framework focuses on guidelines and principles based on AI ethics, especially in higher education.

A content analysis was conducted on 39 documents from 12 universities. The analysis reveals two major themes in the documents: (1) Use of AI in Higher Education and (2) Ethical principles of AI in Higher Education guidelines.

Nordic universities are committed to leveraging AI responsibly while maintaining ethical, pedagogical, and institutional integrity. The results of this study give valuable insights into what kind of issues should be considered in guidelines of ethical AI in higher education and how, in addition to principles, practical examples are also needed for both teaching and learning. The results show that more research, common discussion, and collaboration are required. Additionally, the absence of societal and environmental well-being factors indicates room for continuous development of the policies. © 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Aims: This paper examines how toy-making activities foster creative problem solving among middle school students, focusing on how varying levels of instructional guidance influence their exploration, collaboration, and construction processes.

Study Design: A qualitative, comparative workshop study was conducted in which two groups of students made a Jigging Puppet – one with detailed instructions and the other without detailed instructions. The analysis explored how semiotic processes, i.e. the materials and tools available in the making activity itself, shaped students’ creative and collaborative actions.

Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted in four middle schools across urban and semi-urban regions of Kurukshetra, Haryana, India over a six-month period, including workshop implementation, documentation, and post-activity reflections.

Methodology: Data were collected through classroom observations, photographs, and field notes during hands-on toy-making sessions. The analysis followed an inductive approach with a particular focus on the creative process of toy-making informed by the concept of creative problem solving addressing how learners engage with creative challenges, and the concept of affordances investigating how they shape learners’ interpretation of materials – what they can do with them – and how such material possibilities are shared, and negotiated in collaboration. These dimensions were analyzed to understand how having detailed instructions or no detailed instructions shaped students’ engagement in creative problem solving.

Results: Students without detailed instructions demonstrated higher levels of exploration, experimentation, and adaptive use of materials, though their products often lacked precision or full functionality. Conversely, students with detailed instructions achieved technically refined and functional toys but showed reduced instances of creative divergence. The analysis revealed that linking and framing operated as mediating semiotic resources through which instruction influenced the balance between creativity and precision.

Conclusion: The study demonstrates that toy-making can serve as a structured yet flexible medium to cultivate creative problem solving in middle school education. While minimal instruction fosters curiosity and innovation, structured guidance supports skill development and  functional precision. These findings highlight the value of alternating between open-ended and guided making activities to balance creativity, collaboration, and craftsmanship in learning environments.

Medskapandeorienterat ledarskap är ett paraplybegrepp som beskriver ett sätt att organisera arbetet i en lärande organisation utifrån ett helhetsperspektiv med fokus på undervisning och lärande. I studien inkluderar detta ett ledarskap på två nivåer – rektorsnivå och pedagogisk personalnivå. Ett medskapandeorienterat ledarskap, i motsats till ett ledarskap som utgår från en rektor, kan utgöra en modell för skolutveckling och förbättra skolans verksamhet. Syftet med studien är att i samverkan mellan rektorer, pedagogisk personal och forskare undersöka hur medskapandeorienterat ledarskap kan utvecklas och implementeras med fokus på rektors- och pedagogisk personalnivå. Följande forskningsfråga är vägledande för studien: Vad karaktäriserar ett medskapandeorienterat arbetssätt med avseende på rektors- respektive pedagogisk personalnivå? Studien grundas i den kulturhistoriska aktivitetsteorin (Cultural-Historical Activity Theory - CHAT) och metodologiskt tar den utgångspunkt i en formativ förändringsprocess vars syfte är att stödja rektorernas och den pedagogiska personalens transformativa agens i relation till medskapandeorienterat ledarskap i skolan. Studiens empiriska material består av dokumentation av arbete i så kallade processlaboratorium, som kan ses som en formativ interventionsmetod, där innehållet formas av deltagarna och deras verksamhet, observationer av utvalda ledningsgruppsmöten/undervisningstillfällen samt intervjuer med rektorer och pedagogisk personal. I en processlaboratorium-session analyserar rektorerna, den pedagogiska personalen och forskarna, med hjälp av representativa artefakter, friktioner och problem med specifika aktiviteter och utvecklar nya lösningar. De preliminära resultaten kommer att bidra till kunskap om hur medskapandeorienterat ledarskap kan utvecklas och implementeras både på rektors- och pedagogisk personalnivå. Copyright (c) 2025 Emma Edstrand, Eva Brooks.

Design thinking (DT) used by established design teams has been a topic for research since the 1960s. However, the use of design thinking in organizational settings carried out in novice design teams, that is, users with no experience of design and design methods can still be regarded as a newcomer in research. There is a strong discourse in the field of DT acknowledging the benefits of visualization and experimentation to facilitate and enhance the design process. However, research shows that there is a lack of understanding of the role visualization and experimentation plays in specific phases of design thinking. This work-in-progress paper investigates how a design thinking process can provide a novice design team with resources to release the team’s problem-solving capacity based on the participants’ practical experiences and needs. The study is based on a co-creation methodology including a DT process divided into four phases. Methods used were focus groups with a novice design team including five participants from three different companies within the field of welfare technology. In addition, participant observations were used to capture the participants’ interactions within the different design phases. Expected outcomes will incorporate identified good practices and design guidelines. The study will contribute to unfolding knowledge about how participants from local practices can ensure effective collaboration to cope with emerging dilemmas. © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2024.

Computational play is a novel concept and scarcely researched indicating that there is a need for moving beyond deficient models of Computational Thinking (CT) to more robust knowledge by integrating overlooked needs and interests of children and thus engaging them more substantially in computational play on their own premises. However, outcomes from the authors’ previous studies on digital and computational play in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in a Nordic context demonstrate that digital technology has the potential to reconfigure play activities supporting children’s computational play. Based on a participatory design approach using workshops as a method, the study seeks answers to how play can be used as a pedagogical tool to promote children’s computational explorations, and also the other way around, how computational exploration can inspire and enrich children’s play in ECEC. The aim of the workshop activity is to build a dialogue between researchers, ECEC children and their teachers to integrate computational play into mathematics in ECEC practices. The study will contribute to how an open-ended play-responsive approach to computational play can promote children’s conceptual understanding and how it can be facilitated. The expected outcomes will extend the knowledge of computational play in ECEC practices by incorporating identified good practices and guidelines. © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2024.