Abstract
Play in outdoor environment is crucial for children’s healthy development and learning because it creates meaningful, enduring environmental connections and increases children’s performances. However, the extent of children’s engagement in outdoor play and the way they can learn through play is strongly influenced by the physical and social contacts with the outdoor environments. However, the design of children’s outdoor environment commonly did not address the children’s needs and preferences, which results to low engagement with the environment. It is due to the lack of understanding on child-environment transaction relationship through play. Therefore, this chapter aims to provide a discussion on the transactional relationship of children’s play through the concept of affordances. It discusses how children perceive the properties of the environments in terms of its functionality and playability and how they view the outdoor environment as their “play” grounds. The concept of affordances in children’s play not only informs about the properties and attributes qualities of environments but also indicates the children’s abilities to coping with and adapt to the environmental affordances. The child-environment transaction through play also indicates the level of actualized affordances in the environments and the degree of person-environment fit (P-E fit). In sum, the understanding of child-environment transaction is crucial in the creation of better environment for children’s “play” ground that can optimize their play experiences. The concept of affordances is not only relevant to environmental psychologists but also to geographers, planners, and designers. The relational properties of affordances and the developmental dimension of environments (Heft 1988) can provide the geographers, planners, and designers with insight into how to manage and manipulate the physical environment in supporting different human activities and experiences (Ward Thompson 2013).
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Aziz, N.F., Said, I. (2016). Outdoor Environments as Childrens Play Spaces: Playground Affordances. In: Evans, B., Horton, J., Skelton, T. (eds) Play and Recreation, Health and Wellbeing. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-51-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-51-4_7
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