Outdoor playground use for active healthy play in Toronto, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Outdoor playgrounds provide environments where children can engage in active healthy play and develop important physical, cognitive and social skills. However, little is known regarding children’s play in outdoor playgrounds. Features of playgrounds which encourage use and are safe must be determined to better design these play spaces. This study describes variations in playground use in Toronto, Canada. Methods A naturalistic study was done from August-November 2014. Observations of children were conducted at 20 minute intervals, 4 different times at 50 purposively selected public playgrounds. Descriptive analyses were conducted to describe use patterns by playground features, children’s age, and visible disability. Results There were 2,154 observations of children, with no differences in the numbers of children by the number of play structures available. More children played on rubber surfaced playgrounds (76/playground), with little difference found between sand and woodchips (42 versus 35/playground respectively).Multiuse senior structures, designed for 5–12 years (28%), swings (20%) and multiuse junior structures for those <5 years (18%) were most utilized. Multiuse senior structures were most often used by children < 5 years (69%). Accessible equipment was available at 10 (20%) of playgrounds; however, no children with visible disabilities were observed. Conclusions Variety in equipment is desirable as no single piece of equipment dominated use. However, greater numbers of play structures were unrelated to increased use, which suggests that outdoor natural environments encourage play generally and supports the need for natural elements in playgrounds. Young children were attracted to senior equipment which has injury implications. Accessible equipment was not used by children with disabilities. Recommendations include developing fully accessible flagship playgrounds at specific locations, rather than many playgrounds with limited accessible features. Key message A variety of playground equipment is desirable with the incorporation of natural elements. Equipment was not always used as intended by young children and children with visible disabilities
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".