# Smart Toys in Early Childhood and Primary Education:
## 5 Conclusions  
The term Smart Toys has been established in bibliography and scientific research in recent decades. It characterises the research area that studies when a toy can be considered smart and deals with the development and use of this type of toys in educational or non-educational uses. These games are very diverse, both technologically and educationally. For the time being, there are no categorisations of smart toys in terms of their various features, at least in a systematic way. Individual categorisations may relate to the technologies they incorporate, depending on how children interact with them or the types of activities they support or the purpose they serve. A core categorisation of smart toys can be performed based on their ability to be used as educational or not toys and their learning area. The present paper attempts a systematic review of non-commercial smart toys that have been developed in the last 30 years for the early childhood and primary education (from 3 to 12 years old). This review is organised following two complementary axes: smart toys' technological affordances and educational affordances. The review's objective is to answer two questions:  
1. How are smart toys categorized based on the technological (and other) elements they incorporate? 2. How are smart toys categorized based on the educational framework where they have been developed and used? Our study was based on an in-depth analysis of 50 research articles featuring 52 smart toys developed over 30 years. Although the number of smart toys that have been developed is much greater, we chose to study only those that have no commercial purpose and have been used to a degree or another for educational purposes but not in special needs education. Consequently, we have not analysed any toy for which even no empirical application had been made with children. The research area of smart toys has made significant progress in recent years. It largely relies on the technological development of various fields of Informatics and other sciences (Internet of Things, Robotics, user interfaces, tangible objects, etc.). Over the years, more and more smart toys seem to be developing. Most than half of the toys studied (27/52) have been developed within the last six years. Smart toys focus on a variety of age target groups. Although there does not appear to be a particular tendency to focus on specific ages depending on the year of development, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) shows that young age toys (3-6 or 4-8) appear as early as the first period of these smart toys occurs. In contrast, toys involving older ages (8-12) or toys with an extensive age range (4-12) have appeared mainly in recent years. To answer the question of the categorisation of smart toys based on their technological affordances, we created a categorical variable (also called a qualitative variable) that regards these affordances. The data show four core values (categories) of this variable: (a1) Tangible Features (TF), (a2) Augmented Reality Features (AR), (a3) Internet of Things Features (IoT) and (a4) Sensor equipped Features (SE) as well as four values as combinations of the basic categories: (a5) Tangible Features and Sensors (TF_SE), (a6) Augmented Reality and Tangible Features (AR_TF), (a7) Augmented Reality and and Sensors (AR_SE) and (a8) Internet of Things Features and Tangible Features (IoT_TF). The main categories appear 32 times and their combinations appear 20 times. In addition, these categories are not randomly distributed in the period under examination. For the first twenty-five years, we have had toys with Tangible Features (14/52), Sensors (7/52), Augmented Reality (9/52) and a combination of them. However, only within the last five years, we have toys with IoT features (1/52) or a combination of IoT and Tangible Features (4/52), as well as Augmented Reality and Tangible Features (4/52). Finally, more than half of the smart toys developed combine two technological affordances over the last years.