Jongeneel, D. (Douwe) (2014) Children as architects of their own playground: A study on gap crossing affordances of jumping stones. thesis, Human Movement Sciences.
Full text available on request.Abstract
Looking at playgrounds from an affordance perspective brings to light that contemporary standardized playgrounds−that are playgrounds composed of play facilities that contain a small variety of distances−fail to provide physically active play and motor development for all children, seeing that they do not supply a sufficient amount of action possibilities. The current article examines whether children prefer a single distance or distances that are scaled to their action capabilities, by making children the architects of their own jumping stones playground. This was achieved by letting children place five jumping stones, as they desired, in a room that already had a stone fixed to its centre. Subsequently, the children were free to play for two minutes with the only restriction of not touching the ground. After which the children’s length and action characteristics were measured. Through analysing the resulting playground characteristics combined with the child’s length, action and play characteristics we discovered that children prefer a wide variety of distances within their playgrounds and scale their playground’s maximal and mean gap distances to their perceived maximum jump ability. Hence, the argument is raised that we need to ask ourselves whether we should provide children with standardized playgrounds. After all, if we want our playgrounds to encourage all children to act we need to account for the variation in children’s action capabilities. Key words: Children, Playgrounds, Architecture, Design, Affordances, Gap crossing, Ecological psychology.
| Item Type: | Thesis (UNSPECIFIED) |
|---|---|
| Supervisor name: | Withagen, R. (Rob) |
| Faculty: | Medical Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 01 Apr 2022 12:56 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Apr 2022 12:56 |
| URI: | https://umcg.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/3026 |
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