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Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration
Over the last years, the omnipresent standardization of playgrounds—the distances between, for example, jumping stones tend to be equal—has been criticized by both scientists and architects. First, it has been argued that standardization fails to do justice to the variability in the children’s actio...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5414936/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28467459 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176165 |
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author | Sporrel, Karlijn Caljouw, Simone R. Withagen, Rob |
author_facet | Sporrel, Karlijn Caljouw, Simone R. Withagen, Rob |
author_sort | Sporrel, Karlijn |
collection | PubMed |
description | Over the last years, the omnipresent standardization of playgrounds—the distances between, for example, jumping stones tend to be equal—has been criticized by both scientists and architects. First, it has been argued that standardization fails to do justice to the variability in the children’s action capabilities. Second, it might simplify play in that children repetitively cross over the same distance and, thus, do not have to worry about their movements anymore. In the present study we examined the gap-crossing behavior of children in both a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration. Children, between 5 and 10 years of age, were to play in each configuration for two minutes. No significant differences between the configurations were found in the number of gaps the children crossed and the percentage of jumps (ps>0.05). However, more children crossed a gap that they perceived as challenging (i.e. gap width close to their estimated maximum jumping distance) in the nonstandardized configuration than in the standardized one. Interestingly, significant differences were found in variables reflecting the children’s action preparation—the variation in both the time on a jumping stone and the numbers of steps on it was bigger in the nonstandardized playground than in the standardized one (ps<0.05). The implications of these findings are discussed for both the design of playgrounds and the academic discussions about them. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5414936 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-54149362017-05-14 Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration Sporrel, Karlijn Caljouw, Simone R. Withagen, Rob PLoS One Research Article Over the last years, the omnipresent standardization of playgrounds—the distances between, for example, jumping stones tend to be equal—has been criticized by both scientists and architects. First, it has been argued that standardization fails to do justice to the variability in the children’s action capabilities. Second, it might simplify play in that children repetitively cross over the same distance and, thus, do not have to worry about their movements anymore. In the present study we examined the gap-crossing behavior of children in both a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration. Children, between 5 and 10 years of age, were to play in each configuration for two minutes. No significant differences between the configurations were found in the number of gaps the children crossed and the percentage of jumps (ps>0.05). However, more children crossed a gap that they perceived as challenging (i.e. gap width close to their estimated maximum jumping distance) in the nonstandardized configuration than in the standardized one. Interestingly, significant differences were found in variables reflecting the children’s action preparation—the variation in both the time on a jumping stone and the numbers of steps on it was bigger in the nonstandardized playground than in the standardized one (ps<0.05). The implications of these findings are discussed for both the design of playgrounds and the academic discussions about them. Public Library of Science 2017-05-03 /pmc/articles/PMC5414936/ /pubmed/28467459 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176165 Text en © 2017 Sporrel et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Sporrel, Karlijn Caljouw, Simone R. Withagen, Rob Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration |
title | Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration |
title_full | Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration |
title_fullStr | Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration |
title_full_unstemmed | Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration |
title_short | Gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration |
title_sort | gap-crossing behavior in a standardized and a nonstandardized jumping stone configuration |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5414936/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28467459 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176165 |
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