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Within the United Kingdom the importance of the appropriate parenting of children in their early years has received significant political support. However, it has been found that positive outcomes for young children, in terms of their present experience and future life chances, are often significantly weakened by the impact of poverty. A phenomenological scoping study was undertaken to explore the reasons why parents living in poverty access informal social support networks, in the form of community based toddler groups. The study found that engagement with these networks has value for parents in terms of their mental well-being and their peer education, both of which support their ability to parent a young child appropriately.

Observation of young children is commonplace in educational settings. For trainee practitioners however, gaining access at convenient times can be difficult. Even then, small snapshots of observable activity can only ever be captured. We describe the design and development of a cross-platform software application which can be used to support observations made by pedagogical practitioners. Our application Observation combines game-oriented technology: 3D graphics, animation, physics and classical game artificial intelligence. Simple, data-driven scripting capabilities, requiring no programming experience are also included, enabling the user to customise scenes of characters engaging in learning activities. The well-documented stages of blockplay have been used to represent the physical activity of characters, which is the focus of this paper. Positive feedback was received at a collaborating university in a pilot evaluation of early childhood lecturers and students, paving the way for further development and studies. Our prototype system is available for download and evaluation.

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