By: Jaden Chan

Science news

“Better playground design could help kids get more exercise”

Dear Editor,

I am writing this letter about the article you wrote about a better playground design. I was very intrigued by the article and it got me thinking about a lot of things. It was very interesting to see the results of the tests where they gave schools different equipment, but I do not agree that better equipment makes for more moving. Even if a lot of kids were given the most high-quality items they could dream of, they still might not play and exercise. For example, if everyone there liked reading or playing video games, no matter how good the equipment was, if they didn’t like running around, they wouldn’t do it. They might try it out for the first few times, but stop later on.

I believe that the most efficient way to get kids to move, is to help them mentally rather than physically. What I mean by this is that schools should persuade their students to move to make them want to play rather than spending a lot of money to make them move. They could talk about sports in a different light to make it seem more cool, or just outrightly tell them ‘if you don’t move you die sooner’. These are all methods to motivate the children to exercise by making it their hobby.

This works, because, for example, if you had a burning desire for playing tennis, even if your rackets were heavy or even if it was raining, you might still play. The same concept goes for making people exercise, you just have to give them a reason for running those extra minutes. If people were paid to run, pretty much everyone on the planet would be running at least a mile a day. Of course, the idea here is not to pay people to run, but the concept of reason for running will still be the same. Instead of getting financial gain from running, they would get health and joy gains. A lot of people don’t believe that, so schools could show the scientific proof of that. Other than that, I think that everything else that you said was very astonishing.