Professor Mary Butler

Excludes commercial-in-confidence projects.

Other projects

Movable Objects in Playgrounds (MOPs): This is a collaboration with the Match Studio at UniSA

The idea behind this project is to produce a range of loose equipment/movable objects and to explore the efficacy and acceptability of this equipment in enabling play/activity among adolescents during recess. We will want to understand the sustainability of the concept, since there are many barriers to integrating loose equipment into the playground.

School recess is a unique context that plays an important role in a child’s growth and development. It provides children and adolescents with up to 390 opportunities per school year to engage in freely chosen leisure activities with their peers, which are relatively free from adult control. Furthermore, school recess has numerous academic, physical, cognitive, social, and emotional benefits. For example, children learn key social skills such as sharing, cooperating, taking turns, negotiating, conflict management, and problem solving. There are opportunities to practice motor skills, gain confidence in their movements, and to be physically active. Benefits to classroom behavior have also been reported, with children more attentive and productive following recess. Children who have adequate exposure to outside light have less tendency towards short sightedness (myopia) which is another quiet epidemic among young people spending more time indoors. Young people aged 11-18 would be the primary benefactors of this work. It may extend into primary schools; we are likely to have a particular interest in how accessible this will be to children with disability.

Ensuring that recess interventions are sustained over time is often challenging. While teachers may acknowledge the importance of intervention outcomes, competing priorities and time limitations can take precedence. Interventions utilizing physical environmental variables (such as loose equipment) have been little researched but seem to have a significant impact on playfulness and activity levels in the playground. In this project we want to map out an intervention using movable objects in the playground, particularly for adolescents. We want to explore sustainability and effectiveness in the widest sense of the word, particularly exploring recycled equipment. Physical activity levels decline as children progress towards adolescence, which is mirrored in the recess period. It is also a time when adolescents are less likely to spend time outside, which has impact on their vision. However, recess interventions targeting adolescents are few and far between, which may reflect the limited or non-existent time allocated to recess in some countries. Based on the limited research to date, it appears that loose equipment has the potential to increase physical activity in these settings. In this commercialization project we want to query the impact of integrating loose equipment into school playgrounds and to examine the sustainability question as part of the commercialization journey

Research outputs for the last seven years are shown below. To see earlier years visit ORCID, ResearcherID or Scopus

Open access indicates that an output is open access.

Journal Articles