DANIEL – About 10 years ago you found yourself building playgrounds in South East Asia. How did that happen?

MARCUS – In 2007 I was given an Australian Volunteers International position to work in Thailand. I was doing a bunch of weird stuff. I made solar hot water heaters out of agricultural pipe and plastic rubbish bins, then I installed some in the homes in the local villages. We were in the mountains and it got quite cold in the winter. We were kind of in the middle of nowhere in a rural center.

We’d been there for a few months and the organisation my wife, Willow, worked for said, “We run these children’s programs, could you help us build a playground?” I was open to saying yes to anything. We built this really cool dodecahedron, two-storey cubby house with local thatch. I became friends with the local welder’s shop. I just was doing it for fun, there was no foresight. Then there was this lovely local school principal that I had met. She was coming into town to do some shopping and drove past the playground we were building. She saw what we were doing and asked if I could help build one at her school.

She invited me to come see their playground, so I went, and it was the worst playground I’ve ever seen. One of the pieces was a 44-gallon drum with the ends taken off. It still had the ladder on one side, and it used to have a slide coming off the other side, and it just had these two rusty pegs coming out where the slide had been. In the rainy season it used to fill up and then it totally rusted out. The kids would go up the ladder and crawl over this rusty jagged metal and then jump out the other side over these sharp metal pegs, like a tetanus nightmare.

So, we started to build a new playground there.

I come from a country that has playgrounds everywhere. We take those for granted. There were no playgrounds here. Through some friends I’d made, I got a whole bunch of NGOs together and we made a list of all 75 schools in the region we were going to target. We’d created criteria; they had to have more than 100 kids, and a principal that wasn’t corrupt, that was doing the right thing by the kids.

For the next two years we built a new, custom playground, every two weeks.

We had this leapfrog system; we’d be three quarters of the way through one playground, then a couple of us would go to the next playground to do the community consultation, on, say… the Wednesday of the second week. Then you’d finish the first playground and have the opening ceremony on the Thursday, Friday and then on the weekend you’d do the next design. Then on the Monday you’d start shopping.

Wow. How did that lead you to getting started back in Australia? 

I got home and thought, “What if we took everything we learned and fully documented it?

We could build playgrounds, but I wouldn’t have to travel anywhere.” I couldn’t see a way that we could make playground budgets work for these grassroots communities if I had to fly. This was about 10 years ago, so the Open Source movement was massive. There was this big concept that people could put stuff out there and a community would pick it up and run with it. So, we did.

In 2010, every Saturday, I invited landscape architects over, working with the Australian Institute for Landscape Architects and Co-Design, and a bunch of other organisations. I put the word out to all these amazing designers, and in return for making them a really amazing lunch, I’d give them the photos of all the different things we built, and they would create these IKEA based, step-by-step plans. Other volunteers were working on The Five Step manual or The Safety Manual. the idea was to create, essentially, a place where we had all these elements for others to use.

A million children, you could say that a million children have a place to play without extreme risk of tetanus. How do you describe the impact you’re having?

A million kids have access to a stimulating play space based on the resources that we’ve offered that community.

It’s hard for people in places like Australia to understand, we take it for granted. It’s putting a circle around that place and saying this is not for doing academic learning, this is not for farming, this is not for a market or a bus stop. This is not an empty site. This is for you, and you can play here.

For a lot of children, that is the only place in their entire existence that is for them. In many developing countries, there is literally no space for children. Children play in the gaps and often in quite dangerous places; empty sites full of broken bottles and rubble, in the dark back corners of markets and things.

I’m not some paranoid person who thinks that children need to be constantly tucked away, but for these kids, as a starter, having a space that says, “you’re actually a part of this community and we’ve allocated space for you”, is essential.

What makes a good playground?

Playgrounds shouldn’t follow the “amusement park ride” kind of structure. Not just swing, slides, seesaw. What holds a child’s attention is imagination, creativity and the social aspect of play. Our playgrounds have shifted much more to putting something like a stage and amphitheater in, even if it’s tiny. Or a puppet theater.

One thing that we often do for, say children in a refugee or hospital context, is put in something like a mini-hospital.

Giving them a place to nut that stuff out with their friends is important.

And takes care of itself if the space, time and permission to play is given. 

We’re naturally driven to find answers to things. Play tends to reflect that question asking.

There’s this paradox about it, right.

When we talk about play based learning, it’s problematic in the context of a classroom. It’s not problematic in a playground because the definition of play is that it is self-directed and freely chosen. The power of not having an end goal means that all of a sudden, the whole focus is on the process and it’s in that process that we learn particularly important things, things linked to success like self-regulation, social skills persistence, grit. If no one’s driving you, and there is no end goal, the only person responsible for the outcome is you.

How do you change the classroom?

We are still stuck in this 19^th/20^thCentury education model which is hard to break out of. I think there is a massive discrepancy between what children focus on in their childhood and what they need to focus on, what real life will force them to focus their time on. I’m not talking about the basics: maths, science, history etc. They are important but we focus far too much time on those things and far too early, before we look at things like executive function, socialisation, problem solving, self-motivation, self-regulation, fundamental principles that children need to learn. We live in the world of the professional who is meant to be a self-motivated, self-directed, critical thinking, creative problem solver. I don’t think we are encouraging that in children.

We need to give them spaces where they can explore their own gifts and talents at their own pace.

And we’ve known this for probably 100 years, and yet we still measure children’s effort and behaviour in a classroom environment.

It sets children up for failure.

It’s a set up!