Pedagogical Potential 

Introduction

Play-Doh has been around since the 1950's and is still a very popular toy for children. Its longevity can be theorized to be partly due to the fun and exciting components of being able to build whatever you imagine. But it can also be due to the numerous learning opportunities that Play-Doh affords. As you will see, learning can happen in a variety of ways through Play-Doh, including helping them advance their cognitive and physical development as well as learning aspects of society. 

Pretend Play 

Cognitive Development

Many different types of play are very important for children when they are growing up. One type of play that was focused on by the authors Singer and Singer (n.d.) was pretend play. Pretend play involves taking on the role of another person while also following certain rules and social roles created by the people playing. This was something they discussed further when they pulled upon different theorists to discuss how play can impact a child's development. They included Vygotsky's ideas about development and play. He discussed how play is a primary component of cognitive development and involves a higher level of consciousness (Singer & Singer, n.d.). Play-Doh can be used to play with others and by themselves to facilitate their cognitive development. To be more specific, this level of cognitive development involves the ability to engage in emotional regulation learning as embedded through pretend play. Singer further goes on to describe make-believe play. This is something that can be done with Play-Doh as we saw Eli mold this dough into different things and would pretend this dough was the object he tried to sculpt. This type of play has been shown to facilitate divergent thinking by balancing the ideas about what is reality and what is not (Singer & Singer, n.d.). 

Objects with the same level of malleability such as Play-Doh carry the freedom for children to display some internal feelings through play. This can be seen through Play-Doh's most noticeable property as a heavily sensory-involved object, due to its soft texture. In other words, this property has the capacity for children to be able to rip or apply pressure onto it without destroying it, which can be a great way for them to express possible feelings of frustration onto the object. Children are able to understand that unlike other toys, Play-Doh is a socially accepted object that can be interacted with in more of a rough manner. At the same time, Play-Doh's malleability can be a barrier for younger kids to learn from it because it can easily serve as a choking hazard if left unsupervised. 

Social Skills 

Singer & Singer (n.d.) also discussed how Play-Doh can facilitate very important social skills. Play-Doh can be played with others, which leads children to learn to share and take turns playing with this material, building their social awareness. This teaches cooperation and overall social awareness that is important to learn during childhood. They can develop role scripts when they enact a certain scenario from the molds they make out of Play-Doh, known as sociodramatic play (Singer & Singer, n.d.). This can teach children how to enact a role and follow the rules of their pretend world with others and with themselves. These social skills and the use of role scripts have been shown to lead to high social skills and academic achievement even later in life (Singer & Singer, n.d.). Through studies, Singer & Singer provide evidence of the continuation of these skills, proving that Play-Doh can be important for facilitating skills that last a lifetime. We can see that childhood is such a pivotal time for development and Play-Doh plays a big role in social development.

Language, Colors, & Numbers

Another learning opportunity through children's play with Play-Doh is learning language. Singer & Singer discussed how playing with others can help advance a child's vocabulary (n.d.). This can be done through enacting social roles, as discussed before, which can lead children to possibly use new vocabulary to play their character. A child can ask the adult that they are playing with for help with thinking of a word they don't know, but that is needed to continue the story (Singer & Singer, n.d.). This can also happen through another person describing the Play-Doh and the child asking questions. We saw this with Eli, where his mother would be pointing to each Play-Doh and telling him the color of each one, and she would tell him the names of things he didn't know while playing. 

Gender Roles 

According to the sociological theory of material culture, there is a complex relationship between the individual and society. In this context, artifacts are used to signal an individual's status, wealth, and personal taste in regards to societal values and contexts (Berger, 2016). Baxter also brought this up when talking about archaeological theory, which discussed this topic of artifacts representing a larger part of our culture and social relations that reflect the morals and values of that time period and society (2005). They also explain that the toys that children are given, as well as the toy's characteristics such as color, material, shape, and design, tend to reinforce cultural ideas and expectations of gender/gender norms (Baxter, 2005). Play-Doh is a versatile artifact available in a variety of colors and used for sculpting, molding, squishing, rolling and so much more. With its wide range of colors and multiple uses, Play-Doh itself is not necessarily considered a “girl toy” or a “boy toy”. However, many play-sets, color groupings, and co-branding expansions reflect societal gender norms and expectations. Play sets designed to be marketed toward girls tend to have a color palette of a wide range of pinks and purples and other colors that society has deemed to be "girl" colors. These sets tend to center around themes of flowers, animals, and cooking which reflect societal views of feminine interests. On the other hand, Play-Doh sets whose target audience are young boys tend to be made of traditional "boy colors" colors such as red, blue, and green. They also tend to center around themes of construction, trucks, and dinosaurs. We even observed this with Eli as he had a Play-Doh kit that had trucks and stereotypical boy interests.

It should be noted that play sets where the set itself is not made in traditional "gendered" color palettes can also be marketed along a gendered divide. Many Play-Doh cooking sets are made in the same red color. However, these sets are still marketed toward either boys or girls depending on societal ideas of gender roles and the subject of the set. For example, the "Play-Doh Burger Barbecue Set", "Play-Doh Kitchen Creations Magical Mixer Play-set", and the "Toy Mixer with Play Kitchen Accessories" have very similar color palettes (Hasbro, n.d.). However, due to societal expectations that barbecuing is for men and baking is for women, the actual colors of Play-Doh included in the set indicate the set's target audience. While the barbecue set has colors that reflect real-world barbecue ingredients such as brown for meat and green for lettuce, the mixer play set included colors that were much less realistic colors of baking ingredients including the color pink (Hasbro, n.d.). By looking at all of the cooking-related Play-Doh sets we could find on the Hasbro shop, we saw a similar pattern of pink Play-Doh being included in sets whose subject fell under a traditionally feminine role (cooking, baking, etc.). On the other hand, this was never seen in sets that had subjects that were traditionally masculine. These color choices seem to signal the play-set's intended audience and also reinforce social views of gender roles in this object. This aligns with archaeological theory and what Baxter discussed, as we can see this artifact represents this greater aspect of society and how we value gender roles (2005). These sets contribute to the gender binary and the continuation of gender stereotypes. As these sets are usually for children, this makes these gender stereotypes salient to people from a very young age.

Limitations

Although Play-Doh is a powerful educational tool for children, it could fail to teach them the same level of morals and values that other forms of guided play could provide. For example, Vikaros & Degand's excerpt about video games talks of the possible ethical development opportunities of a child playing through this medium (2010). Unlike technology, Play-Doh does not have the properties of creating an elaborate fantasy world which has already been designed by a professional for them to make either a moral wrong or right choice. Therefore, a child interacting with Play-Doh would not have their choices of play influenced by external ideas of ethics or social roles created by adults. When compared to video games or board games that already have an ultimate structured goal for the player, Play-Doh allows players the freedom to set their own goals. Also many of these educational opportunities involve having an adult there to play with the child and facilitate this learning. Individual Play-Doh play has the possibility of lacking some of these learning capabilities in comparison to other toys like video games. 

Conclusion

Taking everything into account that we discussed, its apparent that there are a wide range of learning opportunities for children when using Play-Doh. From language learning, social skills, and gender roles, we can see that there are some learning opportunities which are cut short, but also an extensive amount of learning opportunities with Play-Doh. Overall, Play-Doh is an overwhelmingly positive object, as Play-Doh can be very versatile by helping in many aspects of children's development and learning. This is important for parents to note because we can see how Play-Doh affords the facilitation of different forms of play with children, just through this one object's plethora of properties.