Tag: socialization

Real Play, and the ideal playground

Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway.

What I really like about the Skudeneshavn Primary School playground in Karmøy, Norway is the sheer variety of things available for the students to do (hat tip to Mary Cour). I also like the philosophy. Asbjørn Flemmen’s research on the social and motor skills benefits of play, true children’s play, is the key guiding principle behind the design of the playground. His philosophy is that:

Real play is a spontaneous and social activity, dependent upon its environment, where interaction takes place through extensive use of gross-motor movement. – Flemmen (2009)

Because it is spontaneous, real play is also intrinsically driven, coming from children’s innate motivation. Flemmen view of the role of grown-up’s is the same as Montessori’s, to direct the environment. He draws a clear distinction between the real play of children’s culture and the competitive sports that typify adult culture (Flemmen, 2009), where behavior is directed by the adults.

The Skudeneshavn playground embodies these principles by providing a variety of opportunity to challenge all skill levels and interests, and having materials that attract the interest of their students. Indeed, to stimulate interest, a key part of the playground design is to have “activities the children can not yet master and do not dare to do so”.

Jungle area. Students have the opportunity to take risks.

Real play also needs an environment that stimulates social interaction (again very Montessori), and Flemmen’s approach to conflict resolution is the let the kids sort it out. This is somewhat controversial, especially when you consider the possibility of bullying, yet there is some evidence that this approach works. The variety of the activities available make it so that the children are seldom bored.

Flemmen has an interesting chapter in the book, “Several Perspectives on Children’s Play: Scientific Reflections for Practitioners” (Chapter 11). I also find his table comparing children’s play to adult sports to be a very useful template for considering how to organize physical education.

War games and aggression

In terms of general use, girls utilized computers to connect with others, and boys used computers to compete with others. – Christie (2005)

There are clear gender differences in the way adolescents use computers and play computer/console games. Boys tend toward the violent, competitive games. This is not just my own experience as the above quote from a large study of middle schoolers in South Carolina shows.

Furthermore, and more worrisome, the violence in the games may spill over into real life. In 2004, Gentile et al. found that:

Adolescents who expose themselves to greater amounts of video game violence were more hostile, reported getting into arguments with teachers more frequently, were more likely to be involved in physical fights, and performed more poorly in school. –

They reference a 2001 study by Anderson and Bushman that integrated a lot of the previous work and showed that:

… across 54 independent tests of the relation between video game violence and aggression, involving 4262 participants, there appear to be five consistent results of playing games with violent content. Playing violent games increases aggressive behaviors, increases aggressive cognitions, increases aggressive emotions, increases physiological arousal, and decreases prosocial behaviors. These effects are robust; they have been found in children and adults, in males and females, and in experimental and non- experimental studies

In graphical form it looks like this:

How video games lead to violence
How video games lead to aggression. (From Anderson and Bushman, 2001)

I can’t say I’ve observed this myself, but it is certainly cause for concern. In fact, a later study by the same authors and Nicholas Carnagey (Carnagey et al., 2007) found that people who played violent video games were actually physically desensitized to violence (though the method used in this study is not nearly as convincing as the previous work).

Finally, the degree you can personalize characters in video games is improving rapidly. Some very recent research from Fischer et al. (2010) found that:

playing a violent video game with a personalized game character … increased aggressive responses.

I have to say that I find the evidence from this albeit quick survey of the science to be both disturbing and damning. Of course these scientific studies are statistical averages, and each individual is different and is affected by a larger environment than is just in the violent video games. Indeed, I have played these games myself, I know intensive gamers, and have students who regularly play these games and can’t say that I’ve observed much correlation with the games and aggressive behavior. But then again it is sometimes hard to see the forest from beneath the trees.

I guess I’m going to have to be more strict about violent video games. We don’t allow them in the classroom (in general), but I think I’m going to have to stress the issue a bit more when I talk to students and their parents. Of particular concern is when violent games overlap with video game addiction. As with everything in life, moderation is important, and in a time when students are going through large changes and discovering themselves it is essential to help them with self-regulation.