Brussoni – research on children’s play

There’s been a lot of great research on how children play on those kind of prefabricated structures. There’s a landscape architect from the UK called Helen Woolley who has labelled them KFC structures, for kit, fence and carpet. So the carpet being the surfacing, the kit being the structure itself and then there’s usually a fence around them. And she’s done quite a bit of work, as have others, around the play value that those have, how children play on them and so on and comparing those, for example, with play structures or sorry, play spaces where there’s more, say, loose parts or natural materials or those sorts of things. 

And it’s very clear that the play areas where there’s more variety of play, affordances for play, different things that kids can do, are of superior quality and better for the children, developmentally, health, wellbeing-wise, than the ones that rely on fixed equipment that can only be used in a specific way. So, it doesn’t really allow the child to stamp their own imagination on that. 

Plus with; over time, those structures have been getting – the challenge has been taken more and more out of them, so the height has dropped and we’ve seen a lot of what used to be interesting, taken away, and so kids often don’t find them interesting anymore so they can disengage whereas they get much more engaged if they have loose parts or other materials that they can play with, that they can really think about how they want to use that and just do whatever they want with it.