ABSTRACT
Children are voracious consumers of all things digital: computers, internet, digital games, mobile technologies. They are completely at home in the digital world - digital natives living digital lives - meeting, creating, communicating, sharing, within expanding and evolving digital environments. Although there still exists a significant divide between the digital haves and have nots, digital media is nonetheless becoming a ubiquitous feature of children's lives, and digital games a near integral part of their environments. The beauty of the visually appealing interfaces in Kodu, Scratch and Alice, for example, is that they bring a child-like authenticity and emotional resonance to what for children is something abstract and unrelatable. Making and sharing online are as much about collaboration and social skills as they are about technical proficiency. While instructional software has long been a part of a teacher's armoury, video games have only recently come to be seen as rich learning environments in their own right.
