Studying Seven Criteria of Designing Outdoor Play Spaces in Some Kindergartens of Tehran

Abstract

Outdoor play has been formally recognized as an important part of education and creativity of children in recent years.The advantage of this approach is that they learn about the consequences of their choices and it helps to build relationships with other children as a catalyst for creativity; these activities have a significant impact for learning new skills and contributing of children. The playgrounds should be connected directly to other environments in order that children can move towards them to gain an understanding of new things. So walls and fences should be eliminated in playgrounds. Seven criteria (7Cs) were recommended to design outdoor play spaces for children aged two to five. The7Cs is based on findings identified from a five-year multidisciplinary study of outdoor play spaces at child care centers in Vancouver and include character, context, connectivity, change, chance, clarity, and challenge. This study conducted to review these criteria in ten kindergartens in Tehran which were selected randomly from different areas. In our cases the most attention pay to “change” and the least serve to “context” and total attention to the 7Cs is weak.