Dundee University
First Class Honours
Build
RSA Brief: Press Play
The benefits of creative learning and a supportive home environment are huge. Research has shown that playful experiences help children to be happy and healthy but also to develop the skills to be the creative, engaged, lifelong learners.
Imagine new ideas that create opportunities for creative learning and play outside of formal school environments and are embedded in the learner’s local environment - whether that be their community or their home.
This approach could shift current thinking on how learning happens by reimagining play and creating the conditions that allow learning through play to thrive.
Build is a collection of different blocks that can be fitted together to create structures in a primarily outdoor setting, such as forts, obstacle courses, battlefields and anything a child or young teen can imagine.
Build's facilitation of play offers many education opportunities for young minds to develop, particularly in soft skills and communication.
What Build Teaches
Soft skill
“Build” encourages communication from children to articulate ideas, rationalise points and explain what they want to construct as they work to accomplish self-appointed goals. This supports developing teamwork skills, clear rational communication, planning and problem solving skills from a young age.
Build lends itself to naturally teach children how to plan, organise thoughts and problem solve. The symmetrical block’s can be easily counted and understood, helping children plan parts they have and what will reach or connect where. The more they play, the more complex the planning will become. Eventually mastering problem solving skills by working within the limitations of ‘Build’ design.
Risk
‘Build’ gives children the opportunity to judge physical risks for themselves by giving them the chance to learn consequences to their actions from a young age, by building large structures they could fall from. But it has been noted in many studies that when given the opportunity, children can be surprisingly sensible when trusted with something that can obviously hurt them.
Therefore, Build teaches them from an early age to be more sensible with their actions and understand their own capabilities. Too often do you see young teens who without supervision for the first time make discussions that can cause serious bodily harm because they know no better.
Inclusive
Build’ is inclusive of different disabilities as it is a completely self-led type of play. If a family or group of friends have a disabled child, they may accommodate their specific need into whatever they are planning on creating with them.
Role-play
Build fosters and encourages natural role-play in young children’s development. By providing an environment for them to manipulate into what they want to understand from a coffee shop, supermarket, house, hospital or fire station. Role-play is a way to learn, comprehend and understand the world at an early age.
Parental involvement
Some of the blocks can be large so younger children alone require support from parents, but this is intentional. Part of the design for build is to have parents becoming involved and invested in their children's play and imagination. Everyone likes to play and have fun, particularly adults, however as you get older it gets harder to justify. Build helps children become the bridge for adults to cross and give them permission to play.
Parents can then gain more insight into their children and relax.
One to Ten Scale Models
Using 3D printing I had the Build printed on a small scale to observe how others would play and interact with build.
This confirmed the conceptual functionality and lets me see what people would build if left on their own with it. Some followed the rules I had envisioned while others did not.
Background Understanding
Why is play important?
The intervention of childhood 1313: Anselm Archbishop of caterbury 1093: "If you plant a tree in your garden and straightaway, shut it on every side, so it has no space to put out its branches. What kind of tree will you have in a few years when you let it out of its confinement?
Answer: A useless one certainly. With its branches or twisted and knotted.
Reply: And whose fault would this be, except your own for shutting it in so unnaturally?"
This is a old quote but I feel it is still applicable today, surmising adults' attitudes towards trying to mould children into what we believe to be best for them in their growth, before considering what they need to understand and learn about the world first.
Build developed from my fascination with junk playgrounds of the 1950s and later my first-hand experience working with the loose parts playgroup in Dundee.
Junk playgrounds are cordoned off areas that are to be filled with materials such as old cars, scrap, bricks, tyres and more. Children could then use tools such as hammers, shovels, nails and rope to build, construct, dig, destroy, burn - really do anything they imagined within reason or abilities.
This type of play has proven since the beginning to be positive for child development, however struggled to last or take off in society. The main reason being it involves risk of injury, something parents and councils are not accepting of nowadays.
Another reason is it that a field filled with junk, mud and children running around it wildly looks pretty ugly. Finally, it costs money and effort to operate, with a paid play leader needed to supervise and to locate new materials.
However I have seen first-hand how children and parents would resist the idea at the start but by the end be encapsulated, making buses, castles and roller coasters out of literal scrap collected and dumped in a field. It was actually amazing and I personally had not had that much fun in years.
From that experience I really understood and learned that there really is something in this type of experience lost to our generation.
Build is my solution to making a commercial version that can be sold to the public that emulates all the great aspects I experienced with loose parts play.
This is me enjoying role-play at a loose parts play session in Dundee using the children's creations.
I am a receptionist at a hotel taking phone calls and booking guests into the trees behind me.
This is me again playing role-play as a a mad bus driver.
Development of alternative solution
This was my first developmental line of thought as a solution, however I struggled to make it work when making models and realising that it left protruding edges that were not practical when scaled up. They were also hard to play with as they did not fit together on square edges, making it unnecessarily complicated to work with no matter what design version I tried.
