Abstract
Engagement in play has been definitively linked to the healthy development of children across physical, social, cognitive, and emotional domains. The enriched nature of high-quality outdoor play environments can afford a greater diversity of opportunities for play than indoor settings. To more effectively design outdoor play settings, we must better understand how the physical environment supports, or hinders, the different types of play which suit children’s needs and interests. However, play typologies or observation tools available to date do not adequately capture the unique characteristics of outdoor play. This paper outlines the development and testing of the Tool for Observing Play Outdoors (TOPO), a new typology of outdoor play, as well as a systematic field observational protocol which can be used to effectively depict children’s behaviors in outdoor spaces, as well as evaluate the play environment itself. The tool can be deployed in either a collapsed or expanded form to serve the needs of a wide range of studies and environments. This new tool represents a significant advance in the ability to fully and effectively study and plan outdoor play environments to provide more diverse, high-quality play settings that will support the healthy development of children across the spectrum.
Highlights
The tool can be deployed in either a collapsed or expanded form to serve the needs of a wide range of studies and environments. This new tool represents a significant advance in the ability to fully and effectively study and plan outdoor play environments to provide more diverse, high-quality play settings that will support the healthy development of children across the spectrum
Building on insights from the literature review and the field data analysis, we considered each existing play type from the Frost, Hughes, and Rubin typologies to consider whether it was relevant for describing activities that may be commonly observed during outdoor play, as well as whether the current description was capturing outdoor play in either too narrowly or too broadly a sense
While our own primary interest was in preparing a tool which could effectively evaluate the play environment itself, the Tool for Observing Play Outdoors (TOPO) can be used for a range of studies of children’s outdoor and indoor play behaviors, as well as child health and development, when paired with other complementary measures of play and interaction
Summary
Children’s play activities, so long considered to be largely superfluous and aimless [1], or as a way for children to let off steam between formal learning activities, have been definitively linked to the health and development of children [1,2]. Neuroscience studies have demonstrated that when children play, all areas of the brain “light up”, leading to adaptive and prosocial changes at each of the molecular, cellular, and behavioral levels, reinforcing that play activities can simultaneously foster development and learning across all domains—physical, social, cognitive, and emotional [2,3]. These insights suggest we should guard against an approach to play which creates artificial silos between developmental domains, associating certain types of play with a single area of development, but rather understanding play as activities which integrate development across domains. One key to producing play-rich environments for children is understanding how environments can facilitate all forms of developmentally supportive activities and interactions
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