Adventure Playgrounds, Playwork, and Loose Parts: History and Theory (original) (raw)

From bogey mountains to funny houses: Children’s desires for play environment

THIS STUDY ANSWERS the following questions: ‘In what kinds of environments do preschool children want to play?’ and ‘In what kinds of environments do boys and girls want to play?’ Methodologically, the study draws on grounded theory, with data collected among Finnish preschoolers through 15 creation sessions with 49 children from six to seven years of age. Children prefer emotional play worlds, where excitement and amusement can be experienced and where collaborative activities and nature are afforded. Girls created scary and happy play worlds and boys created worlds of aggression and care. Emotional worlds indicate: (1) rich and varied emotions; (2) a desire for physical activity and nature; and (3) common and divergent emotional worlds of the genders. The outcomes have been utilised in designing pilot playful learning environments (PLE) and they will be useful in developing PLEs and play to meet the challenges of education.

EXPLORATION AND MANIPULATION IN CHILDREN'S PLAY SPACES

Children's everyday life takes place in physical spaces, which are usually based on adults' vision of childhood needs. Previous studies of children's everyday life focused on designed play spaces while free play occur in every possible spot; most of which are incidental spaces. Understanding how and where children actually play and what parts of the surrounding environments they use and why, would be useful for designers interested in fulfilling children's priorities and needs. This paper aims to investigate children's experience of their surrounding physical environments through free play in the Cairene context and to extract themes that create engaging settings. The study works directly with young children in order to give them the opportunity to identify their preferred spaces and places for play and to understand the way they use, interact with and experience their surrounding built environment. This paper focuses on children aged 7-9 years as part of a wider research that looked at a larger group of children aged 7-12 years. The children are from two different socio-cultural segments of the society; this helped in understanding children's play in variety of outdoor settings. The study was carried out in February 2015 and lasted for four months in the children's neighborhood and schoolyard. It is an ethnographic study that combines multiple data gathering techniques to allow for an effective engagement with children and empower them to express their experience of places. The study involved participant observation and informal interviews together with four main data gathering techniques: drawing, photography, child-led walks and focus group interviews. The data was analyzed to identify children's play place preferences, patterns of play, features and qualities of play spaces. This leads to the extraction of a set of themes and sub-themes related to the children's play space experiences. This paper will focus on the analysis of 'Exploration & Manipulation' as a core theme in children's play environments.

Children's reflections on play

Journal of Playwork Practice, 2016

This article explores the implementation of PlayPods, designed by Children's Scrapstore in the UK, in two French school playgrounds as part of an Erasmus+ project. The use of PlayPods was an innovative undertaking in France where playwork is an emerging discipline. The researchers used an ethnographic approach to examine the two settings, based on observation and focus groups with children and animateurs 1 to collect data. The ndings include responses to the training presentation and four key issues, which were (1) the scrap material, (2) the animateurs' position, (3) con icts among children and (4) the risks. I conclude with a discussion of the relationship between children's play and French animateurs who adopted an intermediate position between their usual practices and playwork principles.

Skrammellegepladsen: Denmark's first adventure play area

Notes, 2003

This paper reviews the philosophy of the adventure playground movement and particularly the goals of the original adventure playground, Skrammellegepladsen in Copenhagen, Denmark. We then present a case study investigation of the ways that Skrammellegepladsen is used, the perceptions of the users, and the extent that the play area embodies its original philosophy. The findings provide insights into the degree to which they meet children's needs with respect to child development and play theories.