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ON-DEMAND COURSES
Our Continuing Education courses are available either pre-recorded through our learning management system or live through Zoom. Get started creating inclusive, awe-inspiring play solutions by selecting an option below.
All children deserve to grow, play, and thrive in a safe environment. Unfortunately, the society within which we all live is filled with places, conditions, emotional stresses, and even pandemics like Covid 19, that attack our safe places. Children who have experienced trauma and toxic stress require sensitively designed play/recreational environments to minimize the impacts of the attacks from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
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This course will examine successful inclusive playgrounds around the USA—from New York to Nevada. We’ll identify common design elements that help make these playgrounds inclusive. We’ll also see how each community chose to make their playgrounds unique and fit the needs of their constituents with ground-based play, ramps, theming, unique climbers, and tons of sensory play.
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Safety and accessibility surfacing is required in all public playgrounds. It’s also true that surfacing consumes a significant portion of the playground budget. So, how do you get the most bang for your buck? It is easy to increase the play value of the playground by creating designs, games, and undulations with the surfacing to help tell the story of your playground and provide important wayfinding details.
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Swings stimulate a child’s sensory system and help with brain development, but they take up a lot of space in a playground design. Are they worth it? In this workshop, we will discuss the child development benefits of swinging. We’ll also explore the many types of swings that are now available, looking at the advantages of each one.
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Engaging youth in the playground design process can empower youth and create a more meaningful design. But, most of all, it’s fun! This course will review how engaging youth in playground design can benefit the project, youth, and community. We will present several strategies and activities for engaging kids of different ages in various phases of the design process.
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Kids Cove—a beloved community playground in Marquette, Michigan—showed clear signs of deterioration after two generations of service. A group of volunteers identified the need for a new inclusive playground, and the city agreed to support the initiative if the volunteers would lead the fundraising and planning.
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Magic happens on a well-designed early childhood playground, allowing for stimulating and challenging play experiences that meet children’s ongoing developmental needs. The first five years of life are especially critical for brain development and forming the foundation for future learning and behavior. In this course, you’ll embark on a journey of discovery—exploring the importance of gross motor, pretend, and social-emotional play.
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This course will enable you, a landscape architect, to provide ongoing advice and direction to customers undertaking the complex and time-consuming task of raising funds for their playground project. It will show you how successful charities and non-profits identify prospective donors, communicate effectively with those prospects, and sustain interest and engagement in their playground fundraising campaign over time.
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The benefits of playing on a playground are well known. Children get exercise, build up their core gross muscles, and practice balancing as well as other physical play skills. Kids also make friends and practice cooperative play and other social play. The playground is full of sensory play experiences from spinning, to touching to jumping to hearing to seeing. What hasn’t been explored as much as physical, sensory, and social play, are Jean Piaget’s forms of cognitive play.
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What does it take to create an extraordinary playground? What strategies should you put into place so your new playground is visited by families from the neighborhood and from the next county over? In this course, we’ll highlight a variety of built play spaces. We’ll see how playgrounds fit into bigger settings, how theming makes a statement, and how surfacing or even one or two pieces of unique equipment can make a playground extraordinary.
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Nature play has been a hot topic for many years. You’ve probably seen some wonderful natural play spaces and some that make you wonder how safe or maintainable they really are. Developing a connection to nature and even just being outside playing has tremendous benefits for children from lowered stress to increased attention span and greater awareness of nature stewardship.
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Everyone needs play! Get ready to explore several Unlimited Play playgrounds, where each decision about the layout, from the types of equipment chosen to how the surfacing is designed, is carefully thought-out to promote five principles of inclusion. Unlimited Play is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization on a mission to create play spaces that engage children of all abilities in outdoor play.
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What type of cities do we want our children to grow up in? Car-dominated, noisy, polluted and devoid of nature? Or walkable, welcoming, and green? As the climate crisis and urbanization escalate, cities urgently need to become more inclusive and sustainable. This session taught by Tim Gill, scholar, advocate and consultant on childhood, reveals how seeing cities through the eyes of children strengthens the case for planning and transportation policies that work for people of all ages, and for the planet.
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Play is one of the best investments we can make in public health. Research shows that play gets people to move more, connect more, and spend more time outdoors, laying the foundation for a lifetime of health and happiness. Regardless of age, ability, or background, everyone deserves a great place to play! But how we design for play matters.
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