The Endless Playground

The Endless Playground
Author: National Library of Australia
Publisher: National Library Australia
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2000
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780642107244

This lavishly illustrated book takes a broad sweep through the history of Australian childhood, from the early nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on material from the Library's Pictorial, Manuscript, Ephemera and Newspaper Collections, and using excerpts from the Oral History Collection, in addition to specially commissioned feature articles from Robert Holden, and children's writers Steven Herrick, Ursula Dubosarsky and Jack Bedson, the book surveys and celebrates two centuries of growing up in Australia.

The Infinite Playground

The Infinite Playground
Author: Bernard De Koven
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0262543869

In his final work, a visionary game designer reveals how a surprising range of play-based experiences can unlock our imagination and help us capture the power of fun and delight. Bernard De Koven (1941–2018) was a pioneering designer of games and theorist of fun. He studied games long before the field of game studies existed. For De Koven, games could not be reduced to artifacts and rules; they were about a sense of transcendent fun. This book, his last, is about the imagination: the imagination as a playground, a possibility space, and a gateway to wonder. The Infinite Playground extends a play-centered invitation to experience the power and delight unlocked by imagination. It offers a curriculum for playful learning. De Koven guides the readers through a series of observations and techniques, interspersed with games. He begins with the fundamentals of play, and proceeds through the private imagination, the shared imagination, and imagining the world—observing, “the things we imagine can become the world.” Along the way, he reminisces about playing ping-pong with basketball great Bill Russell; begins the instructions for a game called Reception Line with “Mill around”; and introduces blathering games—Blather, Group Blather, Singing Blather, and The Blather Chorale—that allow the player's consciousness to meander freely. Delivered during the last months of his life, The Infinite Playground has been painstakingly cowritten with Holly Gramazio, who worked together with coeditors Celia Pearce and Eric Zimmerman to complete the project as Bernie De Koven's illness made it impossible for him to continue writing. Other prominent game scholars and designers influenced by De Koven, including Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, and members of Bernie's own family, contribute short interstitial essays.

Joker's Playground

Joker's Playground
Author: Lynn Hale Shauingér
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 57
Release: 2015-02-20
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 149697056X

This book begins with the childhood sweetheart husband who was having strange behavior and nightmare flashbacks of Vietnam leaving his home. His wife and four young children are now stranded and alone. The wife is filled with two overwhelming emotions: (1) freedom, as no longer would she have to deal with this unfathomable behavior, and (2) extreme fear, fear of how she and the children would pay for food and rent in this most expensive city. As the endless calls come in from doctors, lawyers, police, and random women, the wife decides to test the citys infinite possibilities of love and hope. This puts her on the brink of insanity.

Playground

Playground
Author: Mies van Hout
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Animals
ISBN: 9781935954514

Two children find many adventures on their journey to the playground.

Playground

Playground
Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: Random House Canada
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 103901156X

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 KIRKUS PRIZE From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure. When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths. Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality. As illness eats away at the brain that built it all, he dreams of the life that could’ve been and the relationships he should never have let go. Before Todd’s final act is up, past loves and present ambitions collide on the ravaged Polynesian island of Makatea, where an unnamed corporation hopes to build the first floating, autonomous city on the open sea. Traversing borders and oceans, connection and loss, ingenuity and transcendence, Playground brings to light the systems of competition, cooperation, commerce, exploration and love that tie the fates of unlikely humans together, in Richard Powers’ most transporting work of fiction yet.

Let's Build a Playground

Let's Build a Playground
Author: Michael J. Rosen
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0763655325

An inspirational true story by the national nonprofit organization dedicated to providing healthy play areas for children traces the efforts of a group of kids and adults from an Indianapolis community who worked with KaBOOM! to build a playground that became the site of endless imaginative adventures.

Primacy

Primacy
Author: Barry D. Wade
Publisher: Author House
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2010-08-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 145206394X

A commiserating and provocative tale, Primacy is an all-important lesson of love, tragedy and inspiration as told from an urban perspective. Propagated in the latter portion of the turbulent 60's, on the outskirts of the gritty streets of Philadelphia, it is the story of a young male born in a 'dysfunctional' household and living in a less than opulent neighborhood. With an adolescent's cognizant awareness of the times and personal events, the prognosticator's life starts out on an anger-laced, emotionally charged tumultuous journey that eventually transcends both the time and the streets of the "City of Brotherly Love". Later in the story as the prognosticator becomes of age you are escorted further into his moral decadence as he takes the reader descriptively fitting into the twenty-first century, meeting with consequences and humility. Eloquently written with appropriate vernacular and speech of the situational characters, this story brings into stark visualization a vivid visitation for the reader. Primacy is an empathetic journey for the many whom have felt that they have been through trying situations and that no other soul could possibly empathize.

Play development in children with disabilties

Play development in children with disabilties
Author: Serenella Besio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3110522144

This book is the result of the first two-year work of Working Group 1 of the network “LUDI – Play for children with disabilities”. LUDI is an Action (2014-2018) financed by COST; it is a multidisciplinary network of more than 30 countries and almost 100 researchers and practitioners belonging to the humanistic and technological fields to study the topic of play for children with disabilities within the framework of the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (WHO, 2001).The principal objective of this book is to bring the LUDI contribution to the important topic of play in children with disabilities, because today an international consensus on the definition of play and disabilities is still lacking. The process of ensuring equity in the exercise of the right to play for children with disabilites requests three actions: to approach this topic through a “common language”, at least all over Europe; to put play at the centre of the multidisciplinary research and intervention regarding the children with disabilities; to grant this topic the status of a scientific and social theme of full visibility and recognized authority. Children with disabilities face several limitations in play, due to several reasons: impairments; playgrounds, toys and other play tools that are not accessible and usable; environments and contexts that are not accessible nor inclusive; lack of educational awareness and intentionality; lack of specific psycho-pedagogical and rehabilitative competence; lack of effective intervention methodologies. Moreover, disabled children’s lives are dominated by medical and rehabilitative practices in which play is always an activity aiming to reach an objective or to provoke an improvement; play for the sake of play is considered a waste of time. The concept of play for the sake of play strongly refers to the distinction between play activities and play-like activities. Play activities are initiated and carried out by the player (alone, with peers, with adults, etc.) for the only purpose of play itself (fun and joy, interest and challenge, love of race and competition, ilinx and dizziness, etc.). They have of course consequences on growth and development, but these consequences are not intentionally pursued. Play-like activities are initiated and conducted by an adult (with one or more children), in educational, clinical, social contexts; they are playful and pleasant, but their main objective is other than play: e.g., cognitive learning, social learning, functional rehabilitation, child's observation and assessment, psychological support, psychotherapy, etc. This book, then, contributes to a clear distinction between play and play-like activities that, hopefully, will bring to new developments in play studies.