An unlikely academic
Highlights
- Former primary school teacher Dr Jane Caughey completed her PhD at ACU with the highest distinction, receiving the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Doctoral Training.
- Her research finds that open-ended online games like Minecraft can support sociodramatic play, considered important for children's cognitive and social development.
- Jane argues that creative play takes time, and that strict screentime limits can cut short the process, a view at odds with the expectations many parents feel to 'police' screen use.
It’s the 1970s in Ballarat, and Jane Caughey and her four siblings are on the floor of their family lounge, where they’d spend countless hours with mountains of Lego in front of them. These were the days when the curated Lego box sets with step-by-step instructions were harder to come by. Instead, children would use their random stash to choose what to build and how.
Jane’s dad had a fishing boat, so the children were inspired to build their own Lego boats. Family holidays were spent in a town called Peterborough near the Twelve Apostles, so they built the farms they passed on the long drive down there, and the beaches they played on with their cousins.
“We were forever creating imaginary situations of the real world and engaging in pretend play,” she says.
The parental supervision of these Lego sessions was minimal. Nobody suggested improvements or told them how to do things properly.
“We did it all by ourselves and there was no micromanaging, no parents saying, ‘maybe you should do it like this’.”
Half a century later, Jane has built a research career around the notion that kids need time and space to create their own imaginary worlds.
Her research draws on the theory of pioneering psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which posits that sociodramatic play – where children act out imaginary situations and play different character roles – is crucial to a child’s cognitive and social development.
In April 2026, she was one of two PhD graduates given the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Training. By that stage, her thesis had already been accepted summa cum laude – with the highest distinction. But when she received her results, Jane – now Dr Caughey – wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking at.
“I remember saying to my husband, ‘oh, I’ve passed, I’ve passed’,” she says, “but when I saw summa cum laude, I didn’t know what it meant and had to Google it. And then I thought, ‘oh okay, that’s good’.”
The career change
Jane Caughey is, in her own words, “a primary school teacher by trade”. Becoming a researcher was never part of the plan.
As an undergraduate student, she dreaded journal articles because they were “so boring”.
“That’s what I used to think anyway,” she says, “as an 18-year-old having to carry those big bound books upstairs at ACU.”
Jane’s connection with the university goes back to the 1990s, when she studied education at the Ballarat Campus. She went on to teach for 13 years, right up until the birth of the first of three children, and then spent some 15 years as a work-from-home mum, writing phonics-based readers and overseeing curriculum for an online literacy company.
When that work started winding down, Jane went looking for a new career.
“I thought to myself, ‘maybe I’ll go back and study’, because that was something I always loved,” she recalls.
ACU seemed the natural place to look. Jane went online and found an academic supervisor named Dr Karen McLean, herself a former primary school teacher.
She arrived at their first meeting with a plan to research phonics, but was steered toward a topic she’d never heard of: digital play, a concept related to the emergence of the digital age as a cultural context for children’s growth and development.
Sent home with a stack of journal articles to get through, Jane recalled her former dread of academic reading. “But I immediately found them really interesting, which shocked me,” she says.
When Dr McLean asked Jane to choose a topic for her master’s research, she mentioned that her own children played Minecraft with friends on the other side of town while talking to them on FaceTime – a set up the kids had worked out all on their own.
“When I told Karen about this, I just remember her face,” Jane says. “She looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got something there’.”
That conversation set Jane on course for both her master’s degree and, eventually, her PhD, with Dr McLean, Professor Suzy Edwards and Professor Kathy Mills guiding her along the way.
Child’s play
What Jane had stumbled upon with her children was a version of sociodramatic play (or social pretend play), but in a vastly different context to the one Vygotsky was writing about – because it was online.
Jane notes that social pretend play, where children use a combination of symbolic objects, actions and language to play out imaginary situations, is common among young children. Take the game of playing shops, where one kid controls the cash register and the other buys items with pretend money.
The online version of this type of play is, she notes, surprisingly rare.
“In the online world, say with rules-based games like Fortnite, there’s still an imaginary element, but the rules are dictated by the virtual game designers,” says Jane, who completed her PhD thesis in 2025.
She likens the open-ended creative mode of Minecraft to a digital version of the childhood Lego pile. Children can build their own imaginary worlds using a collection of objects, while narrating the whole thing to a friend over video chat.
That, Jane argues, is genuine sociodramatic play – relocated from the Lego piles on the kitchen floor to a game on a computer screen. She stresses that building these imaginary worlds requires adult-free time, where children aren’t hurried or helicoptered.
In her PhD research, she coins it “MineTime”.
“It’s time that is mine – it’s not adult’s time, it’s children’s time,” she says. “And that’s where the real learning comes in.”
Screentime police
Jane’s thesis addresses what she terms a “contemporary dilemma”, that children and adults have vastly different lived experiences and perspectives of online play. She set out to identify where kids and their caregivers agreed on screentime matters, and where they clashed.
On the question of whether Minecraft was a positive vehicle for the kind of creative, imaginative play described above, there was clear alignment.
“The game design of Minecraft is amazing,” Jane says. “The kids, parents and grandparents alike loved the fact that there was a range of virtual objects the children could use to create their own imaginary worlds, and even in physical playgrounds and play centres, there’s not much opportunity these days for kids to use these types of tools to get creative.”
Where the tension arose was on screentime. Every child involved in her research disagreed with a one-hour screentime limit on school days. Some of them proposed four hours. One proposed 12.
You might put this down to the kids simply wanting too much of a good thing. But Jane believes there’s something else going on.
“I think it’s that the creative process takes time,” she says.
Building anything worthwhile takes hours of effort before the real play can even begin. Cut the session short, and you risk cutting off the creative process.
“When we were kids sitting around with that Lego pile, we would take two hours to construct what we wanted to play with,” she says. “It’s the same in the digital space. It’s about the interaction with friends and the co-creation.”
Even those parents who could see the positives of screentime were stuck, Jane adds. One mother told her she felt like “the police for the online” in her own home. Another acknowledged she would feel too guilty to let her children have more time for online play, even when it helped the house to be “nice and peaceful”.
In her thesis, Jane cites research showing that caregivers “find themselves succumbing to the seemingly simple public expectation that they should limit or ‘police’ their children’s screen time”.
Part of the goal of her thesis was to challenge what she says are deficit-based views of children’s online play. This includes the perception that any time spent on screens is a waste of time.
“I agree that passive consumption of digital media is not a good thing for children, and I know there are these traditional notions that outdoor play is the pinnacle,” she says.
“But I don’t see children’s online sociodramatic play as a waste of time. It’s just a different form of play, and primary school kids don’t often get a chance to do it.”
An optimistic frame
Today, Dr Jane Caughey works full-time at ACU’s Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education as a Research Fellow on Artificial Intelligence for the Early Years, a project led by her former supervisor Professor Suzy Edwards.
For a recent pilot study, Jane and her colleagues asked children aged seven and eight to depict AI in drawings. Some produced sophisticated AI robots “taking over the world” or “ending humanity”.
Jane found the dystopian drawings concerning. As a self-described worrier who remembers having nightmares about the six o’clock news as a child, she saw it as “potentially very impactful for their lives”.
“I don’t think little seven-year-olds should be worried about AI taking over the world, because there’s already enough to worry about,” she says.
After weeks of workshops, the same children involved in the pilot study drew helpful robots that taught lessons and served food.
“We should be helping children to understand that yes, AI can be used in harmful ways, but it’s created by humans for humans, and if we can frame things more hopefully in a way that empowers them, it can change a young child’s life.”
For all the talk of robots and screens, Jane can’t help but return to that cosy lounge in Ballarat, a mountain of Lego in front of her and all the time in the world to play.
Her research is, in essence, an argument for that type of play – and an acknowledgment of the parents, grandparents and other caregivers who make space for it.
At the end of her thesis, she thanks her own parents, noting that caregivers “rarely receive the credit they truly deserve for providing children with the time, space and objects they need for imaginary and creative play”.
Jane would know. She spent much of her own childhood turning objects into whatever she and her brothers and sisters could imagine.
“We had to create our own products of imagination,” she says, “and we played with them for hours and hours.”
Learn more about ACU’s Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, an interdisciplinary research institute committed to transforming children’s lives through education.
Published 2026