A plain-English digest of a decade of research on learning through play, commissioned by the LEGO Foundation and written with university partners, with a link to where every report now lives. The Foundation's learningthroughplay.com site closed in 2026 and the reports are scattered across repositories, partner sites, and the Internet Archive. This page keeps the evidence findable.
The reports belong to the LEGO Foundation and its research partners. This page summarises and links to them. KW Strategy is independent of the Foundation and of the LEGO Group.
Almost everything the Foundation published rests on two ideas: what makes play a learning experience, and what children gain from it.
The 2017 reviews identified five characteristics of learning through play. Play does not need all five at once, but the more of them it has, the more children learn from it.
The pleasure of finding something out. Enjoyment triggers dopamine in the brain's reward circuits, tied to memory, attention, and motivation. It is why children come back for more.
The play connects something new to something the child already knows: a horse in a field to one in a picture book. That link activates the regions for sense-making and memory.
The child is in charge, absorbed, and making decisions. This is associated with stronger executive function: the capacity to focus, plan, and switch tasks.
Trying, adapting, and trying again. Repetition with variation fires reward and memory networks together and is linked to flexible, inventive thinking.
Playing with others builds relationships and empathy, and the research links it to better mental health and a greater capacity to cope with stress.
The second framework describes what children gain. The skills are called holistic because real tasks never use one at a time: hide-and-seek asks a child to tolerate not knowing, reason out a hiding place, persuade friends to join, and squeeze into a tight space.
Running, climbing, and balancing build strength and coordination and release endorphins that lift mood. Fine-motor play, from stacking blocks to planting seeds, counts too.
Playing with others teaches negotiation, listening, and arguing an idea through. Collaboration in childhood predicts later success at school, at work, and in relationships.
Absorbing play stretches feelings as well as thinking. Children learn to read a playmate's mood, persist with a hard puzzle, lose gracefully, and stay level-headed.
Immersion in play builds reasoning, memory, and concentration more effectively than instruction alone, and flexible thinking prepares children for work that does not yet exist.
How children express themselves, and how they connect ideas and test them. It runs from imagining a broom as a horse to engineering a parachute for an egg.
The characteristics and their neuroscience come from two 2017 reviews: Learning Through Play: A Review of the Evidence (Zosh and colleagues) and Neuroscience and Learning Through Play (Liu and colleagues), with a companion review by Whitebread and colleagues on the role of play in development. The skills framework was tested most thoroughly in 2022, when Zosh, Hassinger-Das, and Laurie reviewed more than 300 studies from over 40 countries and found a consistent positive link between learning through play and all five skills (archived copy).
Ten findings, each with its source and the best available copy. University, United Nations, and repository links come first; where the only copy is on the Wayback Machine, it is marked as an archived copy.
Adults tend to swing between leaving children alone and telling them exactly what to do. The research points to the middle: an adult sets an open challenge and the child leads. In one study of four- and five-year-olds learning shapes, the guided-play group understood them better than the free-play and direct-instruction groups, both immediately and a week later.
Source: Play Facilitation: The Science Behind the Art of Engaging Young Children (Jensen, Pyle, Zosh, Ebrahim, Zaragoza Scherman, Reunamo, and Hamre, 2019). University of Helsinki
Amy Jo Dowd and Bo Stjerne Thomsen reviewed 26 studies of early-learning programmes for three- to six-year-olds in 18 countries. All 26 found that play supported development, including in low-resource settings. Seven showed playful learning helping disadvantaged children catch up with better-off peers, on outcomes from motor skills to maths. Guided play needed no special equipment; teachers in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Rwanda used it in ordinary classrooms.
Source: Learning Through Play: Increasing Impact, Reducing Inequality (Dowd and Thomsen, 2021). IssueLab (Candid)
Rachel Parker of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and Bo Stjerne Thomsen examined eight child-centred primary pedagogies already used in schools, including active learning, experiential learning, and Montessori. Mapped against the five characteristics, all eight turned out to be playful. Play in school is not a new experiment; it is a name for what good schools already do, and what systems could adopt deliberately.
Source: Learning Through Play at School: A Framework for Policy and Practice (Parker and Thomsen, March 2019). ACER research repository
Ordinary stress is manageable with a supportive adult near. Toxic stress, from serious illness, bereavement, or neglect, wears down a child's resilience. Children with more playful lives were better at expressing feelings and handling setbacks, and space to play restored a sense of control for traumatised children. Hospital play programmes made wards less frightening, and teachers trained in play therapy became more empathetic.
Source: Learning to Cope Through Play (Solis, Liu, and Popp). Archived copy
In the first three years the brain forms new connections at a rate often cited as a million per second, and responsive back-and-forth play with a trusted adult drives that growth. Wright, Hirsh-Pasek, and Thomsen argue that long lists of structured activities exhaust families, and that small everyday moments are what matter developmentally. The Foundation's guidance rests on the Nurturing Care Framework of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and supports three of its five components.
Sources: Playful Learning and Joyful Parenting (Wright, Hirsh-Pasek, and Thomsen, 2022). Archived copy · What We Mean by Playful Parenting in the Early Years. IET Education · Nurturing Care Framework
Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) is a joint project of UNICEF and the LEGO Group, funded by the Foundation and led by UNICEF Innocenti with university partners in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its 2022 report drew on workshops with over 300 children in 13 countries plus data on 35,000 more; children defined wellbeing as physical, emotional, and above all social. The 2024 report set out RITEC-8, eight dimensions of wellbeing that well-designed games can support, from competence and autonomy to safety and inclusion. Gains were largest for children who felt least fulfilled elsewhere, and depended on design. Earlier work by Marsh and colleagues in the United Kingdom and South Africa found adult involvement was the decisive factor.
Sources: RITEC (UNICEF Innocenti, 2022 and 2024). UNICEF Innocenti · Children, Technology and Play (Marsh and colleagues, 2020). University of Sheffield
The 2022 Play Well Study surveyed 57,374 people in 35 countries: 32,781 parents and 24,593 children aged five to twelve. Most children said play made them happier, and most wanted more of it with their parents. In Denmark, the think tank Taenketanken Mandag Morgen asked about 1,700 children what makes a good life: a loving family came first, and over 40 per cent of older children said they missed play. One 13-year-old put it plainly: "you should always keep playing".
Sources: LEGO Play Well Study 2022. Findings on lego.com · The Good Life, According to Children (Mandag Morgen, 2021). Mandag Morgen, archived English copy
Rebuilding Systems interviewed policymakers in Australia, Colombia, Finland, Peru, South Africa, and South Korea about putting social and emotional learning (SEL) at the centre of education. The lessons are practical: play is the backbone of SEL where it works; teachers need training; reforms need cross-party appeal to survive a change of government; and assessment has to keep pace, as Colombia's two decades of SEL assessment show. Creating Systems did the same for creativity, drawing ten lessons from Australia, Japan, Scotland, Thailand, and Wales.
Sources: Rebuilding Systems: National Stories of Social and Emotional Learning Reform (2022). Fab Inc. · Creating Systems (Creativity Matters series). Archived copy
The Creativity Matters series defines creativity as exploring, connecting with, and transforming the world, and treats it as a muscle exercised from birth rather than a gift. Creating Creators interviewed seven reform-minded experts, including Mitchel Resnick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and Andreas Schleicher of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and found systems funnelling children into subject silos. Assessing Creativity (2020) answered the objection that creativity cannot be measured with a palette of approaches rather than one test.
Sources: Creating Creators (Creativity Matters 1). Archived copy · What We Mean by: Creativity. Archived copy · Assessing Creativity: A Palette of Possibilities (2020). Catalogue record
The Foundation's position paper on the skills gap argues that classrooms have gained smartboards and laptops without the teaching model moving forward. It asks what success at school means and whether the right things are measured, and calls for schools tied to research hubs, faster sharing of progress data, and collaboration across parents, teachers, policymakers, and communities. A 2022 paper by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues, for the LEGO Foundation and the Yidan Foundation, extended the argument to homes, cities, and digital spaces.
Sources: Closing the Skills Gap (position paper). Archived copy · Where Global Science Meets Playful Learning (Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues, February 2022). UC Berkeley Babylab
The best external home for each report, checked on 2 October 2026. Where no university, repository, or partner copy exists, the link is an Internet Archive snapshot.
| Report | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| Learning Through Play: A Review of the Evidence | ResearchGate · archived copy |
| Neuroscience and Learning Through Play | ResearchGate · archived copy |
| The Role of Play in Children's Development | ResearchGate · archived copy |
| Closing the Skills Gap | Archived copy |
| Learning to Cope Through Play | Archived copy |
| Play Facilitation: The Science Behind the Art of Engaging Young Children | University of Helsinki (PDF) · Helsinki research portal |
| Learning Through Play: Increasing Impact, Reducing Inequality | IssueLab (Candid) |
| Playful Learning and Joyful Parenting | Archived copy · ECE Accelerator listing |
| Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) | UNICEF Innocenti |
| Rebuilding Systems: National Stories of Social and Emotional Learning Reform | Fab Inc. (PDF) |
| Children, Technology and Play | University of Sheffield (data and tools) · archived copy of the report |
| Learning Through Digital Play: The Educational Power of Children Making and Sharing Digital Creations | MIT Media Lab project page · archived copy |
| The Good Life, According to Children | Mandag Morgen (Danish, PDF) · archived English copy |
| What We Mean by Playful Parenting in the Early Years | IET Education (PDF) · REYN listing |
| Learning Through Play and the Development of Holistic Skills Across Childhood | Archived copy |
| LEGO Play Well Study 2022 | lego.com news release |
| LEGO Play Well Report 2018 | lego.com news release |
| Where Global Science Meets Playful Learning | UC Berkeley Babylab (PDF) |
| What We Mean by: Creativity | Archived copy |
| Assessing Creativity: A Palette of Possibilities | Google Books catalogue record (no online copy found) |
| Creating Creators | Archived copy |
| Creating Systems | Archived copy |
| Creating Reforms: National and Sub-National Stories of Creativity Reform | Fab Inc. publications page |
| Learning Through Play at School: A Framework for Policy and Practice | ACER research repository |
Three items from the original site have no copy we could find: the Distance Learning Guide (2022), 5 Ways Books Can Empower Play (2023), and the Play Well 2022 infographic. If you know where one lives, tell us and we will add the link.
We built this page because evidence that cannot be found cannot be used. This research was commissioned to persuade governments and funders that play belongs in schools, homes, and policy. When the site that held it closed, most of the reports lost their only public address. Anyone citing this work in a strategy or a grant proposal needs a link that still works next year.
The findings also say something about how funders measure what they pay for. The evidence on guided play, social and emotional learning, and creativity is strong, but it does not fit neatly into test scores. Our co-founder Euan Wilmshurst has argued that the learning part of monitoring, evaluation, and learning is the part that routinely goes missing, and that play is easy to count and hard to value. His pieces The silent L in MEL and Protect play, protect childhood set out the case.
If you are a funder deciding whether play-based learning belongs in your portfolio, or a system leader turning this evidence into a curriculum, we can help you work out what the research supports, what it does not, and how to say so to a board or a minister. See our philanthropy advisory work.
Euan led advocacy and communications at the LEGO Foundation while much of this research was published, and spent years explaining it to ministers, funders, and journalists. This digest is his summary, published by KW Strategy, and independent of the LEGO Foundation and the LEGO Group. Corrections are welcome.
To put the evidence to work, see the Play Activities Library and the International Day of Play, 11 June each year.
If you are making the case for play to a board, a ministry, or a funder, talk to us.
