Intellibility Assessment in a Square Shaped Preschool Classroom According to the Grouping of Children of 3 to 5 Year of Age

Abstract

Architecture and Acoustic are intimately related, been sound an extremely important part of the human natural environment. Sounds give specific qualities to spaces establishing whether or not a hearing condition is pleasant or annoying to those who inhabit them, and may or may not favor oral communication, a fundamental activity in human interaction. A pleasant sound may improve human wellbeing, while a noise can be a great obstacle to a person's comfort, creating discomfort, concentration issues and health problems. The role of architecture is clear, since the form and materiality of a space, change its acoustic conditions. The use of space and the activity to be developed, as such, determine the acoustic requirements. Within these, clarity of message delivered is critical in an indoor environment and it's evaluated through a parameter called intelligibility. The overall object of this paper is to determine whether or not the intelligibility of a space is modify by the way it is occupied. For the case study, an environment with high demands on intelligibility was selected: a preschool classroom with children age 3 to 5 years old, where acoustic requirements are determined by two factors. The first is the very condition of an educational environment, whose primary function is the learning process, for which communication is essential and regarding the field of acoustics concerns, the clarity of the message transmitted orally. The second factor is related to a group of users who have physical characteristics and spatial requirements that must be met from an architectural design point of view. An additional aspect to consider is that the use of space differs from a traditional classroom dynamics, since children that age, appropriate and modify their spatial occupation in several ways. The evaluated space was a square shaped classroom made of a brick based building system, which is a proper representation of the building systems used in traditional preschool educational spaces in the city of Medellín, where the study was conducted. The methodology that was used in this study, focused on evaluating the intelligibility of the space, by both, theoretical calculations and field tests, with measurements and analysis processes that were adjusted to the physical conditions of children, such as the equipment heights and the representation of the phenomenon, besides considering three groupings identified as the most common in kindergartens classrooms: roundtable, backs against the wall and distributed in small groups. The results indicated that the quality of intelligibility in the preschool classroom, in fact, varies according to the type of use for each way of grouping. It was also concluded, that the evaluated types of grouping in the preschool classroom, create different areas with varying intelligibility, allowing to identify were it is necessary to make reinforcements on surface finishes within the classrooms, and to identify places that are optimal location for teachers.