Effective Use of Nature in Educational Spaces Design

Abstract

F. Mozaffar, S. S. Mirmoradi · Effective Use of Nature in Educational Spaces Design · pp 381-392 Introduction Technology development has been effective in the children’s lifestyle, especially in the big cities. Children have been separated from the routine living in the nature as their presence in nature has been limited. Researchers at the University of Maryland discovered that between 1981 and 2003, in a typical week, children lost over nine hours of discretionary time, and computer use doubled. Studies released in 2005 and 2006 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, concluded that children between the ages of 8 and 18 “spent an average of nearly 6.5 hours a day plugged in electronics” (Louv,2005,p.119). One of the measurable impact of this for young children is that preschooler’s “risk for obesity increases by 6% for every hour of TV watched a day” (Linn, 2008, p.49) though the “childhood link between outdoor activity and physical health is clear. Nowadays, the relationship between children and nature is being weakened and this problem should be improved by protecting the natural spaces at schools and the other public places which may be usable for children. Natural spaces at schools should provide three categories of children’s needs which are denominated to: “educational”, “communal and physical”, and childreneducational spacenaturearchitecturelandscape One of the most effective spaces on children’s life is Educational spaces, where the children usually spend long period of their life there. According to various important aspects of outdoor and natural spaces in education and children’s nurture skills, design of these spaces is an essential issue among the topics raised in designing educational spaces. Natural spaces at schools should provide three categories of children’s needs, which are denominated to: “educational”, “communal and physical”, and “emotional” needs. For all of these categories, the special spaces and desirable designing have to be concerned to achieve the most efficient educational spaces. Furthermore, outdoor designing and natural spaces will affect on artificial spaces of schools, due to the strong relationship between them. In current study, the effect of those three mentioned categories has been evaluated on the designing of educational spaces. Also, the effect of each aspect has been considered separately to recognize which principles are required to design an idealistic educational space. Effective Use of Nature in Educational Spaces Design