Team Name
BREAD4
Elevator Pitch
In 3-4 sentences, provide a short description of the project.
<aside> ⚡ School playgrounds create the opportunity for building social skills and encouraging creativity among K-12 students, but they are far from a perfect solution. With students moving towards virtual worlds that can let them bring their wildest ideas into reality, we want to innovate on what a physical playground can bring to encourage this same level of creativity. Our design aims to create a world that encourages students to be whoever they want to be and makes it accessible to students that might not have such opportunities elsewhere.
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About the project In a paragraph for each section, write what inspired you, what your deliverable does, what you learned, how you built your project, the challenges you faced, and what’s next. Detailed bullet points are accepted.
<aside> 💡 Background Research
How might we set up educationally enhancing and safe playgrounds in poorly developed neighborhoods?
Playgrounds were originally ideated and influenced through the minds of adults. Children prefer to play in natural environments than traditional playgrounds, and the steel bars of thin structures can only provide so much entertainment. The impacts of COVID-19 left children and early toddlers indoors where activities were limited by the confinements of their house.
Spontaneous play allows for children to imagine and choose roles they like [1], and objects create a “play space” to experiment different social scenarios [2]. Unstructured play challenges children’s coordination, social, and creative interaction [3].
If there’s anywhere that children are least exposed to proper self-expression, it would be low income areas. Playground safety has been a huge problem in playgrounds located in areas associated with poverty [4]. In low-income areas, where children often lack access to safe and stimulating play environments, we can set up educationally enhancing and safe playgrounds by prioritizing community involvement.
Sources:
[1] Creativity in Playgrounds: A literature review
[2] How Playgrounds Encourage Social Interactions In Communities
*[3] [The role of playgrounds in the development of children’s fundamental movement skills: A scoping review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10718446/#:~:text=Literature indicates that unstructured play,awareness [17%2C18].)*
[4] Playground safety and access in Boston neighborhoods
What it does Our playground has different structures that focus on stimilating imaginative role play, such as market stalls and an ice cream truck. The market stalls have chalkboard surfaces on the front for kids to draw and express themselves artistically. To further creative deleopment, there are two interactive drawing boards, which is an 8x8 grid of spinning octagonal prisms with different colors on each side that kids can use to create “pixel art”.
The ice cream truck structure has containers with sand to simulate ice cream, and promote sensory play. There are also bins in front meant to be an interactive acctivity for children to learn sustainable waste disposal practices.
How we built it
Challenges we ran into We had a few challenges regarding financial feasibility and safety. Our original ideas incorporated digital aspects to the playground, but because our target demographic is low income communities, we had to ensure our structures were low cost to build and maintain, while also making them engaging and unique. We also had concerns about safety, specifically with the possibility of loose objects and wood chips being thrown around.
To counter the problem with wood chips, we decided to make the ground surface of the playground rubber, which is softer and isn’t made out of loose items. We also made analog variants for our digital ideas, such as the octagonal prism block grid to mimis pixel art.
Accomplishments that we're proud of We’re proud of being able to create an environment that inspires individual and collective creativity in children of all backgrounds. Although this is not a perfect model that addresses all potential issues, we hope that the concept is one that will be further explored and achievable in the near future. **
What we learned One thing that we learned is that it's more difficult to design for a physical space compared to a digital space. We noticed that in comparison to designing for something like a phone, you only have to consider the screen and the software behind it whereas with something like a physical design, there are a lot of concerns regarding the hardware and some of the physical constraints of trying to build things that aren’t typically present when developing a software product.
Another thing we learned is that it's difficult to imagine what your target user is thinking when you yourself are not part of that target demographic. Typically in our designs, we look at users that we can easily survey or interview as a convenience sample such as college students or even adults that we have easy access to like our parents. With users that aren’t as easy to survey, such as children, we can't exactly pinpoint what pain means and frustrations they might have especially with using typical methods like surveys due to feasibility constraints. As a result, we decided to look at other methods of understanding and empathizing with these users like research papers and critiquing existing products that these users already interact with normally.
What's next
As for next steps, we would like to bring this concept out into the real world, conducting surveys and user research to see what our target audience, children, think about a playground like this. Collaborating with public servants and parents will be an essential step in making sure that we are able to accommodate a child’s needs while ensuring that the park is feasible and safe to play. Partnering with recycling facilities and initiatives can help us with infographics about our playgrounds that teach sustainable waste disposal.
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Built With What platforms, languages, or other technologies did you use? (i.e. Figma, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator)
<aside> ⚒️ FigJam - brainstorming, team research coordination Figma - drawing the prototype playground map Paper/Pencil- iterating layouts
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🔗 "Try it out" links
Add links where people can view or try your project.
🗂 Upload a File