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In recent times, engineering education has increasingly emerged as a valued kindergarten practice. Engineering teaching in play brings challenges for Chinese kindergarten teachers. An educational experiment (EE) was conducted to help Chinese kindergarten teachers face this challenge. Qualitative data including video data and interview transcripts were collected in a public kindergarten located in a Chinese provincial capital city. Participants included one focused teacher and 28 children aged four to five years. In the context of early childhood education, drawing upon a cultural-historical perspective, we study how engineering pedagogical practices changed under the conditions of an intervention, called an engineering Conceptual PlayWorld (CPW). The findings show a shift in the focused teacher's subject positioning, and new practice contexts in which an engineering pedagogy emerged. We argue that a CPW created motivating conditions for Chinese kindergarten teachers to explore new engineering pedagogical practices, wherein they realised a new form of collective imaginary play and designed new engineering pedagogies for teaching young children.

Previous studies have emphasised that play can promote children's learning of mathematics. However, little research has been directed towards understanding how collective imaginary play motivates children's mathematical learning. Informed by the cultural-historical conception of play and motives, this paper examines how Conceptual PlayWorld (CPW) creates conditions for Chinese children's meaningful mathematical learning using the concept of repeating patterns as an example. Video observations of teachers interacting with children (4-5 years) during the CPW implementation (8.54 h), as well as children's interviews (5.75 h), were gathered and analysed. Following the focus child Zeng's motives and intentions but all children's experiences in the CPW, the findings show CPW appears to create mathematical conditions that promote thinking, imagining and play. Zeng's motives for mathematical learning are stimulated by his play motives which are amplified through his active participation and problem-solving in a CPW, and this creates conditions for his personally meaningful learning of mathematics in the Chinese kindergarten context.