Play For All: a design competition for playground innovation

Result

Winner
Monster Playground / Mike Lau (rumblefishy)

View other winner and entries...

Overview

An international non-profit that promotes the importance of play for children in the developing world, is sponsoring a design competition to promote innovate playground designs. The winning design will be built for a school for refugee children along the border of Thailand and Burma (Myanmar).

Category Idea Competition / Open to Students / Competition Result
Type International, Project, Open, Two-Stage , Anonymous
Genre Kids, School
Country Thailand
RegDeadline 17 November 2010 GoogleCal iCal
3 January 2010 (via Online) GoogleCal
Eligibility All

Description
Go Play! directly addresses the importance of play in education in developing countries. While classroom learning is important, play provides a different environment for children to learn and develop skills in order to put their learning into practice daily. Schools in the developing world tend to teach using ROTE learning or call and response methods. Providing other ways for children to learn is critical. Play does this and Go Play! creates spaces to encourage play.
Playgrounds designed and built for children help form the skills needed to face a world in constant flux, where changeability and adaptability is the key to survival.
Education systems all over the world are trying to create learning environments for children that prepare them for a rapidly changing future. To learn to live in such a world, children need much more than basic knowledge. A playground is the place for children to form the building blocks of creative, critical and collaborative thinking: from the invention of games and solutions to complex problems, to negotiating rules and inventing new scenarios -- play is the soil for the planting of new ideas.

Jury
Confirmed: Darell Hammond, CEO KaBOOM! (US), Larry Scarpa, Pugh + Scarpa Architects (US); Andrew Maynard, architect (AU); Dr. Beth Doll, Professor - Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Marlon Blackwell, architect (US); Liam Garland, Managing Director, Bay Area, Education Pioneers (US); Jennifer Siegal, architect (US); Kitti Upariphutthiphong, Education(Thailand); Rachel Bentley, Children on the Edge (UK); Members of the community and school (Thailand/Myanmar)
Quilian Riano, Designer & Blogger (www.dsgnagnc.org) (US); Matt Huxtable, landscape architect (AU); Rachel Bentley, Director, Children on the Edge (UK); Lena Weller, Help without Frontiers (Thailand); Barry Richards, architect, Rockwell Group (US)

Prize
The winning design team: up to $1000 USD usable towards travel expenses to and within Thailand to oversee the construction of the design (If the winning design team cannot travel to Thailand, they will be awarded $300USD, and the balance of the travel stipend ($700USD) will be applied towards the construction costs of the new playground.)

Entry Fee
$25 per entry

Entries
Project Description Text (200 word minimum), Presentation Board @ 24"x36", Plan(s), Elevation(s)

Organizer
Architecture for Humanity

Official Website
http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/competitions/playforall