Recess success

The deleterious effects of changing children's playground equipment. (Good)

The results of these developments are far-reaching. Many kids, with their sense of play stunted by disuse, sometimes don’t even know how to go about it. For a kid raised on PlayStation, a slide isn’t going to get the job done. “People are focusing on getting kids outside and getting them physical,” says Patricia Donald of the innovative Adventure Playground, in Berkeley, California. “But the playgrounds that they have just don’t do that anymore. If you’re used to going from your climate-controlled house to your climate-controlled car to your climate-controlled school and then back to your computer, you don’t go outside and you don’t have to think about creating and manipulating things.”