DESIGNING LEARNING SPACES FOR CHILDREN

Abstract

Child's learning occurs through its surrounding built environment. Though for most of young children the first learning space is a home, but it does not provide all the necessary facilities and amenities that would help in physical, cognitive, social and emotional development of a child. So there is a need of proper design of learning spaces which would amplify the overall development of a child. In general, user should ideally shape the space surrounding him which is not simple in case of children. So the responsibility of an architect increases in designing the learning spaces for children. The work presented in this dissertation aims to understand the specific needs of young children that would help in their better learning and transfer them into architectural implication. Also it attempts to weave together, various parameters for designing learning space for children, i.e., psychological and physiological parameters. To achieve these goals, the methodology that has been adopted is both qualitative and quantitative, where data collected through direct observation and interviewing parents/teachers, and analysed by coding the qualitative and quantitative data with support of photographs. in the second chapter various literatures are followed from different research articles, books, journals, e-journals and student's dissertation work on various design parameters for designing learning space, which involved a brief study of behaviour of children i.e., the psychological parameters and the other important parameter is the physiological parameter, where several natural effects like the role of light, sound, temperature and fresh air is discussed. It also tried to understand the learning for children, where active learning plays an important role. To support these studies various practical cases has been studied in the third chapter, that focuses on study of select learning spaces (pre-school/ kindergarten) in the Indian context, which offers all the facilities and amenities that is required for overall development of children that have flexible environment, experimental spaces with ample scope for play, connection with -4 outdoors, emphasis on child's behaviour and noble educational philosophy. Based upon the findings of the research, various design solutions for products that will amplify the activities of child and design guidelines for effective learning spaces have been recommended.