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by Renata Hopkins

When is a slide not just a slide? When it’s also the neck of a giraffe, the tongue of a taniwha, or part of a giant chess set. These are just some of the exciting ideas Christchurch school students had for the BNZ Amazing Place Playground competition.

The competition asked students to design the best playground in the world for the central city rebuild.

Their entry could be an artwork, a 3-D model, a poster, a DVD, a storyboard, a website – in fact any format they wanted to use.

The year 4 winners let their imaginations go wild – jungle wild!

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making Amazing places

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Table of contents →

How

Do You

From

Know?

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Hayley, Ruth, Kiara, and Oakley

The year 4 winners were Ruth Lagokamu, Oakley Wynard, Hayley Richards, and Kiara Clark from Freeville School in New Brighton. Their entry, The Jungle Playground, was all about animals. The climbing bars were snakes, the slide was a giraffe, and the flying fox was shaped like a real fox. The design also included a burger bar, a pool, and a miniature train track. To show the judges their fantastic idea, the girls built a 3-D model using modelling clay, ice-block sticks, cardboard, and paint.

Year 4 winners

Using a survey

The team all thought that “older kids like animals and so do younger kids”. But were they right? To find out, the girls put together a survey. A survey is a set of questions used to gather information. One question the girls asked was “Would you like a giraffe slide?” When they looked at the results, they found that more people had answered “yes” than “no”. Information like this is called data. The team could use their data as evidence that other kids liked their ideas.

If you wanted to design a playground others would love to visit, what survey questions would you ask?

Ice block stick in headings: By Aaron McKirdy, copyright © Crown 2014�Photograph: By Renata Hopkins Copyright © Crown 2014�Picture frame around image of students: Copyright © Stephen Fuller, used with permission

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A Dutch animal playground

The Freeville team also did some “field research”. This means studying how things work in the real world – in other words, outside a classroom or laboratory. The team visited six playgrounds to observe, learn, and gather ideas for their design. The girls saw that the earthquakes had broken many of the paddling pools in the playgrounds. The paddling pools that were not broken were very popular, so the girls added a fish-shaped paddling pool to their model. It had a safe shallow end for younger kids and a deeper end that older kids could enjoy.

doing research

Try it yourself. Search online for “World’s Best Playgrounds”. You’ll see amazing ideas that have actually been built. A lot of these playgrounds use bright colours and unusual shapes. And you’ll see lots of animals!

Another way to make something exciting and new is to ask “What works already that I can adapt?” The team did a lot of online research to find answers to this question.

The year 4 winners used this research as evidence that their ideas were popular all over the world. But they didn’t copy anything. They took the ideas they saw and changed them to suit their playground.

Adapting other ideas

Photograph: “Speeltuin bij de Hooge Vuursche” by E. Dronkert from http://goo.gl/4LTnna is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Planning has begun for the playground, using ideas from the competition. The playground will be called the Margaret Mahy Family Playground after the famous Christchurch writer. The people who design and build it will use more research and evidence to make sure the playground is safe and fun for children of all ages and abilities.

Thanks to the imagination and hard work of students like Kiara, Ruth, Hayley, and Oakley, Christchurch is going to be an amazing place.

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An artist’s impression of the Margaret Mahy Family Playground

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Acknowledgments

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All the text, images, and photographs in this article may be copied, distributed, displayed, and revised in all media by teachers and students. Please attribute the work to the writers, illustrators, and photographers, where appropriate.��Text copyright © Crown 2014