Notebooks, blogs and commercial video games as evocative objects in classrooms

From the theoretical perspective offered by socio-cultural psychology and the concept of evocative objects, the main goal of this paper is to explore what happened in a primary education classroom where digital objects (commercial video games and blogs) coexisted with more traditional objects such as notebooks. Adopting an ethnographic and action research point of view, we explored the conversations and practices that took place during the school year, when three consecutive workshops were organised around three commercial video games. We focus on one second year elementary school group and their teacher. Three main results were obtained. First, the number of references to notebooks, the internet and video games made by the participants differed depending on the role they played in the workshop. Second, mediated by evocative objects the children, the teacher and the researchers created several innovative scenarios in which specific abilities emerged in relation to particular video games. Finally, evocative objects were mediators in the collaborative situations arising in the classroom.