The increasing popularity of tabletop devices is bringing a new generation of game applications that extend the traditional notion of board-games by being played on digitally augmented surfaces. The tangible interaction approach has become during the last years a promising alternative to multi-touch tabletops for very young children. Children learning with Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) can take benefit of the same pedagogical values as learning with materials in a physical play.  The AffectiveLab has developed NIKVision tabletop and games to give leisure and fun while reinforcing physical manipulation and co-located gaming for young children. The objective of our work has been to explore the benefits that this kind of technology offers to these children, in terms of usability, user experience, and physical co-located playing in education environments. Lately, the effort of the group in this area has been the development of ToyVision, a software toolkit aimed to make easy the prototyping of tangible games in visual based tabletop devices.