The Playground Project is a multi-national Esprit project, co-ordinated by the Institute of Education at London University. The project is researching the design of virtual playgrounds in which young children (age 6 to 8 years) can not only play by the rules but also with the rules of a variety of types of games. During 1999/2000 Dave Pratt worked full-time on the project, co-ordinated by Professors Richard Noss and Celia Hoyles, designing the initial specifications of a playground based on Imagine, a new powerful version of Logo. This playground is called Pathways.

 

During 2001, Dave Pratt has been working in a local school, researching children’s thinking about rules when they use Pathways, and how that thinking changes when they use the tools. The design of Pathways continues to evolve in the light of these experiences. He has begun to disseminate some of the recent findings at conferences:

Goldstein, R., Noss, R., Kalas, I & Pratt, D. (2001) Building Rules, Cognitive Tools 2001, University of Warwick.

Goldstein, R. & Pratt, D. (2001) Michael’s Computer Game: A Case of Open Modelling, Proceedings of the Twenty Fifth Annual Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics, Utrecht: The Netherlands.

 

The playground, developed with others by Dave Pratt, is now published by Logotron as the Magic Forest.

 

Further information can be found at: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/playground/