Children’s Perceptions of Mixed Reality Play

This article reports on child-focused reflections from research findings of a year-long investigation working with primary school aged children and young people in England exploring mixed reality play. 58 children and young people were engaged in the project and actively participated in 29 focus group interviews over time. Thematic qualitative analysis revealed five broad features of mixed reality play from a child’s perspective: dimensional embodiment, creating worlds, dramatizing and gaming, agentic action and inside and outside spaces. Through the adopted lens of children’s reflective engagement, this article hypothesises that mixed reality presents an environment for digital natives (Prensky, 2001) to play openly and creatively, and puts forth an argument for new technological opportunities and transformations of pedagogic practice.