Children’s sense-making through exploration: Grasping physical and virtual materialities

Abstract

A child’s sense-making is grounded in his or her bodily interactions with the environment and tied to the body’s sensory experience. Digital technologies are being introduced into children’s learning environments and they experience virtual materialities to a greater extent now ever before. This study aimed to uncover how young children make sense of the world through explorative touch interactions with physical and virtual materialities. Children’s sense-making was studied through an explorative inquiry that was supported by video documentation. This article discusses how the combination of materials, digital technologies and experiences of different materialities offers new opportunities for explorative interaction, transforming and shaping children’s experience of the world through joint sense-making. It also identifies how children’s past experience of material touch is important for them in their process of grasping virtual materiality.