ABSTRACT
Educational digital technologies often promise “fun” learning. This chapter uses ABC tablet apps as a case study for a critical investigation of what ideas about literacy, learning, and fun commercial educational software are imbued with. The study is theoretically informed by critical social semiotic perspectives on literacy, multimodality, and technology and approaches software as socially situated meaning making. The empirical basis is a set of ABC apps for iPads for Norwegian preschool children (< 6 years). Four discourses of fun learning are identified in the App Store presentations of the apps: amusing, playful, motivational, and creative learning. Rewards are found to be the main means to achieve fun in the apps, and three types of rewarding multimodal ensembles are identified, described, and critiqued: celebrations, multimodally nestled verbal feedback, and quantitative measurements. The study critically discusses the apps’ version of fun as rewards and shows how the apps are inscribed with obsolete educational ideas about learning as simple stimuli–response contingencies.
