Playful Learning as a Bridge Between Coding and Mathematics in Teacher Education

Recent Italian curricular guidelines emphasize an interdisciplinary approach in STEM education grounded in learning-by-doing and the use of digital and playful resources. Within these guidelines, Informatics is recognized as a conceptual core of Mathematics Education from early schooling, highlighting the need to integrate computational and mathematical thinking from the outset of teacher education. Computational thinking shares key dimensions with mathematical thinking, and Playful Learning can act as a pedagogical bridge between them, supporting disciplinary integration through engaging learning experiences. This qualitative exploratory case study, involving pre service primary school teachers, examines collaboratively designed digital games on spatial orientation created with the Octostudio app. The instructional design included collaborative prototyping and game design integrating playful dimensions through the Playful Experiences framework. A thematic qualitative analysis of game prototypes and related activities was conducted to identify experiential profiles of designs’ playful dimensions and the stimulated cognitive operations through the R-I-Z-A model. Findings suggest that designing playful activities can mediate between content knowledge and promote the development of professional competence.