The Playable Kids Project is over and scholars from all over the world viewed the entries at the conference of the International Play Association and The Association for the Study of Play last week. The goal of Playable Kids is to use children's creativity to inspire and inform the professionals in the Playable 2010 competition. To that end, we are creating an eBook that will include the most insightful entries, such as this one from Cabot, Vermont:

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Kids know how to play, and we think they can show grownups how to design the most fun playspaces in the world! See:

(10-year-old Michael designed a treehouse. Then an architect made it real!)
KIDS, enter PLAYABLEKIDS. Your pictures will be exhibited at a conference of play experts who will learn a lot from what you draw. We will publish as many of the designs as we can online and use them to show designers in the Playable 2010 International Design Competition how to make the coolest playgrounds in the world! Check out the details below, and join in for some fun!

Playable 2010 International Design Competition is a worldwide contest that invites designers, architects, artists, craftspeople, landscape architects, and others to create awesome and wonder-filled places for children to play.

Playable Kids is the first phase of Playable 2010 International Design Competition because kids know what is fun. We want to get their ideas together and make sure the grownups really listen. You see, we don't want to end up with some really cool designs that grownups like to look at and praise, if, at the end of the day, kids think they are lame.

There is a fascinating report from UNICEF called Children's Participation from Tokenism to Citizenship by Dr. Roger A. Hart at the Children's Environments Research Group at CUNY. He charts the authenticity of children's participation in projects from manipulation all the way up the ladder to "child-initiated, shared decisions with adults." (p. 8) We think that working our way up to the top rung of this ladder will yield not only exciting playspaces, but also wonderful young citizens of the world.

So, we welcome your participation in Playable 2010 and the participation of your children in PlayableKids and beyond. We've left the instructions for the kids purposefully broad. We want to see where they will take us. Once the entries are in we won't close the doors on the children. We will find ways for them to be involved throughout the process. Some will even serve as judges selecting the winners of the grownup categories of our competition.

We encourage you to let your children lead the way and have some fun while they're at it.