Fostering a more active community - Skills Gardens as community playgrounds

 

A couple of years ago, I was working on a project with a national sport to review their junior sport pathway program, including game scaling progressions. A ‘side conversation’ was about raising the visibility of the sport. I suggested working with a local government council to build and then trial a themed to the sport playground, drawing on the idea of a Skills Garden, in place of community playground. We got as far as chatting with a playground designer on a design before a change of leadership at the national sport saw the game scaling project terminated.

The Skills Garden concept is a development of the Athletic Skills Company and their Athletic Skills Model.

The Athletic Skills Model (ASM) is a philosophy and framework for human movement development. A premise of the ASM is that people develop better, healthier, and more resilient movement skills through versatile movement experiences across many activities.

A Skills Garden is a specially designed outdoor environment that encourages people of all ages and abilities to engage in varied movement experiences. Instead of a space being dedicated to a single activity, a Skills Garden provides many movement challenges within one integrated space. The layout is intentionally designed to invite exploration of multiple forms of movement.

Research looking at participant use of Skills Garden compared to traditional community activity spaces found:

·       *The Skill Gardens attracted approximately three times as many users compared to the traditional spaces.

·       *Skills Gardens had more than twice as many participants engaging in moderate to vigorous physical activity 

·       *Skills Gardens had and 18% increase in female participation compared to the traditional spaces.

·      *Skills Gardens had greater diversity of movement types.

To read the study click here 

In our proposal, the sport would apply the ASM principles to playground design to create an environment that develops the general movement foundations of the sport and those games like it while remaining versatile, fun, and inclusive. It would not be a miniature version of a sport facility and instead a playground that develops the broad movement abilities that underpin that sport and games like it. The playground design creates a play environment that engages the general movement foundations of the sport and those like it. It is not building a miniature version of a sport facility and instead creating a playground that invites exploration, adventure and play that engages the broad movement abilities that underpin being able to play that sport and others like it.

Athletic Skills Model emphasises varied movement, exploration, creativity, and the development of multiple fundamental movement patterns and so the sport themed playground (for example, a Netball Garden) would include the AMS “Wheel of 10” to create the movement exploration opportunities in the ‘garden’ – Running, Jumping, Balancing, Climbing, Throwing, Catching, Rotating, Rhythm, Resistance, Locomotion across varied terrain. [To read more about the “Wheel of 10” see Savelsbergh & Wormhoudt (2018) click here]

To read more about the Athletic Skills Model I recommend reading Wormhoudt and colleagues (2018) click here 

It would be great to work with an Australian sport interested in developing and trialing a community sports garden/playground. If interested in working on a project like this, you can get in touch with me via https://www.flinders.edu.au/people/shane.pill