Together Through Play

Well, I said that I'd aim to get new blog posts out fortnightly, and lo and behold, here I am with my second blog post already a day late. Ah well, the best laid plans and all that....

Anyway, here we are: blog post number two and the first one on actual content! Today, I wanted to provide an introduction to a project that currently has me very excited: Together Through Play. I'll try to keep it short: I'll provide an overview today, and go into more depth on certain aspects of the

Together Through Play is the informal name for a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust investigating inclusive play, on which I am Principal Investigator (PI). The official name for the project is “Facilitating Meaningful Play Between Disabled and Non-Disabled Children through Participatory Design”, which is more informative, but also more unwieldy, so we adopted the Together Through Play moniker (TTP, henceforth, to save on my fingers!) as a more user-friendly alternative. In fact, this separation suits me well, as it offers the opportunity to keep the Together Through Play brand going beyond the three-year scope of the “Facilitating Meaningful Play...” project and into future projects. More on that in due course.

Anyway, this is a three year project which started in January 2011, and will end in December 2013 – so we're now onto the final straight, and indeed this blog provides one of the means of disseminating our findings. For now, though, I want to focus on the background of the project, and what it's all about.

Who's Involved?

There are three key people involved in the project: I am the PI, and provide the engineering input to the project; Angharad Beckett from the School of Sociology and Social Policy (and a fellow member of the Centre for Disability Studies) is a co-investigator, and provides the sociological input; and Anne-Marie Moore is the PhD Researcher employed on the project – she does the day-to-day data gathering and product testing, which means a lot of liaising with the participating schools!

In addition, we have a number of schools involved, and some undergraduate Engineering and Product Design students have helped to design and build the toys that we are testing.

What's the Project About, then?
In one sentence: the aim of the project is to explore the aspirations of disabled and non-disabled children for playing together, the barriers that prevent this, and what might be done to overcome them.

Let's unpack what that actually means. There are a few strands to this.

Firstly, let's recognise that play is a really important part of child development. According to the United Nations, “Children have the right to relax and play, and to join in a wide range of cultural, artistic and other recreational activities” [1]. It plays an important part in helping children to develop motor skills, as well as social skills and to explore and experiment through role-play: David Cohen's “The Development of Play” [2] provides a good overview of the value of play in child development, including the helpful observation that researchers have made play into a “serious business”, as if play for the purpose of relaxation was somehow a waste of time. That's a sober warning for us, certainly, and note that the children's rights include the right to relax! Anyway, the key point here is that play is important, and if you don't get access to a broad range of play, then you don't get as much chance to develop skills: be they of the cognitive, motor or social variety.

Secondly, there is the matter of integration. There has been a general move towards inclusive education, meaning that more children with physical or cognitive impairments are educated in mainstream schools rather than being segregated into a separate school system. Not all children, certainly, but more children. However, there is a need to recognise that just because a child is educated in the same class doesn't necessarily mean that they're included. Again, I won't go into that debate here: if you want a good overview, you can refer to Barton and Armstrong [3]. The point is that inclusivity doesn't just mean accessibility: it's not sufficient to have disabled and non-disabled children playing next to each other. They have to be engaging in a way that is positive for both of them, from which they both benefit and which they both enjoy. The question is – does this happen? And if not, is there anything we can do to support this?

Our aim isn't to develop inclusive toys per se – that's something I have to say every time I mention the project, because the immediate assumption is that what we're trying to do is to build inclusive toys. Rather, what we want to find out is: what are children's aspirations for playing together? What helps or hinders this? Children are not the easiest people to interview, especially not on such an emotive subject. So we've adopted Alison Druin's approach of Co-operative Inquiry [4], where we encourage children to co-design inclusive toys and games, not because we assume they'll come up with great toys and games, but as a way of better understanding what they want from play. The designs become a focus for discussion, rather than an end in themselves.

To this end, we've undertaken several rounds of working with groups of disabled and non-disabled children, developing ideas into prototypes, testing and refining them. We're now onto the final stages – we've already carried out all the user testing we need. Anne-Marie and Angharad in the process of carrying out a thorough analysis of the data gathered, and I'm in the process of building one of the two final prototypes that we'd like to take in for final evaluation by the participating children. Which has given me a handy opportunity to get my hands dirty with a Raspberry Pi, PiFace and PyGame, which is always a good thing!

And for all that – the concepts, the testing, the analysis – that's for another post. See you in a fortnight. And who knows? Maybe one of these days I'll actually get some pictures up on this blog, and get some formatting sorted out...

 

References

[1] Article 31 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. An overview can be found at: http://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf, accessed 26^th July, 2013.

[2] Cohen D. (2006) The Development of Play. 3^rd Ed. Routledge

[3] Barton L. and Armstrong F. (2007) Policy, experience and change: Cross-cultural reflections on inclusive education. Dordrecht: Springer.

[4] Druin A. (1998) The Design of Children’s Technology. San Francisco: Morgan Kauffman.