Learning Landscapes: Playing the Way to Learning and Engagement in Public Spaces

Abstract

Children from under-resourced communities regularly enter formal schooling lagging behind their peers. These deficits in areas such as language development, reading readiness, and even in the kind of spatial skills that predict later mathematical knowledge, may persist throughout their lifespan. To address such gaps, policymakers have focused largely on schooling as the great equalizer. Yet, children only spend 20% of their waking hours in school. How can developmental scientists and educators address this "other 80%" for the benefit of children's development? One answer is the Learning Landscapes initiative, which involves crafting carefully planned play experiences that focus on learning outcomes, particularly for children and families from under-resourced communities. Playful learning, a broad pedagogical approach featuring child-directed play methods, provides a unique way to foster learning and engagement organically within the built environment. Learning Landscapes already incorporates several well-documented projects. The Ultimate Block Party brought over 50,000 people to Central Park to engage in playful learning activities. Supermarkets became hotspots for caregiver-child interaction by simply adding prompts for caregiver-child interaction through signage in everyday "trapped" experiences. Urban Thinkscape transformed a bus stop and adjacent lot into a hub for playful learning while families were waiting for public transportation. Finally, Parkopolis is a life-size human board game that fosters STEM and reasoning skills in public spaces. This paper reflects on data from these projects while reflecting on lessons learned and future directions.

Element Enterprise Tycoon: Playing Board Games to Learn Chemistry in Daily Life

“…Previous research suggested that science board games should simulate students to apply scientific knowledge when dealing with life situations. Moreover, if the only topic that was gamified was the scientific concept, for middle school students who have studied only the basic concepts of chemistry, it is difficult to maintain interest in playing the games [15][16][17]. Therefore, there is still room for improvement in the current scientific board games in teaching the periodic table of the chemical elements.…”

Learning Landscapes: Where the Science of Learning Meets Architectural Design

“…We have written about the benefits of Learning Landscapes for children from low‐income families (Hassinger‐Das, Bustamante, Hirsh‐Pasek, & Golinkoff, ), but we also recognize the importance of these projects for all children. From a strengths‐based perspective, Learning Landscapes are meant to interact with families’ knowledge—the information and skills already present in their households (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, )—to produce meaningful play and learning experiences for children in the places families spend time.…”

“…In the first pilot study, children playing Parkopolis used significantly more STEM language (e.g., whole number, fraction, spatial, and measurement language); made more observations; and showed greater engagement, confidence, and persistence working with difficult problems than children in a control condition who were asked to invent their own game in an outdoor space (a proxy for what children may do at a park without Parkopolis; Hassinger‐Das, Bustamante, Hirsh‐Pasek, & Golinkoff, ). A larger version of Parkopolis is being tested at the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.…”

Play Captains on Play Streets: A Community-University Playful Learning and Teen Leadership Collaboration

“…Research suggests that playful learning may be more beneficial to children than rote or directive learning practices (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016) and can be especially beneficial in community settings because they support cohesion and ownership (Hassinger-Das, Bustamante, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2018). Research further shows many children experience summer learning loss, but youth from low-income communities are especially affected by this "summer slide" (Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996).…”

“…In summary, the mechanism of the playful learning projects is to enhance caregiver-child social interaction by prompting caregivers to initiate targeted interactions filled with skill-building topics with their children during moments that would otherwise be filled with silence or children playing alone. These playful interactions form a foundation for children's social-emotional-cognitive development (Hassinger-Das et al, 2018). In this paper, we present a case study of a university-community partnership integrating cross-age peer mentoring, positive youth development, and evidence from the learning sciences into a communitybased playful learning program (Karcher, 2009).…”