Cooking as Play, Role as Work: Integrating Fun Cooking and Role Play for Early Childhood Entrepreneurship Skills—A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This systematic literature review synthesizes evidence on the use of fun cooking and role play to develop entrepreneurship-related skills in early childhood education. The review followed PRISMA 2020 principles and examined publications from 2020 to 2025 identified through Google Scholar, Scopus, DOAJ, Sinta, university repositories, and reference tracking. Of 303 records identified, 54 duplicates were removed, 249 titles and abstracts were screened, 84 full-text reports were assessed, and 20 studies were included in the qualitative thematic synthesis. Three themes emerged. First, fun cooking provides a production-oriented learning context in which children practice planning, measuring, creating, collaborating, persisting, and taking responsibility for a tangible product. Second, role play provides a social and market-oriented context that strengthens communication, negotiation, decision-making, confidence, and early understanding of exchange and service. Third, integrating both activities creates a developmentally appropriate production-to-market learning cycle in which children make, present, exchange, and reflect on products or services. The evidence is nevertheless geographically concentrated, methodologically heterogeneous, and dominated by short-term studies; direct tests of an integrated model remain rare. The review proposes an experiential framework and recommends classroom-based, longitudinal, and cross-cultural research using clearer measures of early entrepreneurship skills.