On a tight budget, educators and designers add value to the renovation of an elementary school campus by turning outdoor spaces into playful learning zones.
The last phase of the renovation of Washington Elementary School, a 1940s-era campus in Santa Ana, Calif., started with a simple premise. “We were working with a limited budget, but we wanted to transform the school, every part of it,” says Jeremy Cogan, director of planning and design for the Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD).
As LPA designers worked with the district on the last phase of the campus-wide renovation — including a new library, cafeteria and kindergarten building — discussions focused on the space between the buildings, a 47,000-square-foot, largely hardcourt play area. The district was already experimenting with Learning Landscapes, a concept focused on integrating education opportunities into play spaces.
“There’s going to be an expenditure to paint this hard court one way or another, why not create a learning space outside and experiment a little bit?” Cogan says. The designers and landscape architects met with University of California Irvine Assistant Professor Andres Bustamante, a leading researcher in the field, and were encouraged to explore new ideas.
“We opened everyone up to the idea of, let your imagination run loose on this,” Cogan says. “I think the team was phenomenal in the ideas that came out of that.”
The result is a much different type of play space. The mix of social and play zones includes an extensive integration of learning themes into the traditional game areas. The layout pushes the envelope of the typical Learning Landscape concept with new ideas and new games to encourage learning, physical activity and critical thinking.
“It becomes a whole new way to engage in learning, in a fun manner,” says LPA landscape architect Lancelot Hunter.
Building on New Ideas
For Santa Ana USD, the learning landscapes concept was a perfect fit for Washington Elementary School. The visual and performing arts (VAPA) academy had been languishing for decades, and it was desperately in need of modernization to help spark student’s creativity and imagination. The renovation of the new library, cafeteria and kindergarten included multiple large-scale murals, a piano-key architectural motif and a welcoming, lively promenade.
The project kicked off during the COVID pandemic, amid heightened focus on outdoor spaces. “A lot of what was on our minds at the time was learning not confined to the four walls of a classroom,” Cogan says.
The idea of integrating games and learning in is an extension of a larger nationwide initiative, Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL), which reimagines public spaces as hubs for play and learning. Among other advantages, PLL “seeks to address learning
Inequalities that exist outside of the classroom by marrying the science of learning with urban design and placemaking,” according to the Brookings Institution. Educators are taking the next step, focusing the concepts on school grounds.
“Inclusive outdoor learning environments help students grow and learn in ways not possible within a traditional classroom,” says LPA Landscape Architect Lancelot Hunter. “Fresh air, sunlight, a connection to nature, and a variety of experiences help students explore and learn from their environment.”
SAUSD had recently dipped a toe into Learning Landscapes by implementing “Fraction Ball” courts — which alters the lines of a basketball court to emphasize fraction and decimal learning — and several graphic elements at several schools. The district and LPA collaborated on a more extensive program for the Lydia Romero-Cruz Academy, which added graphics to facilitate learning and cooperative play to under-utilized spaces around the 50-year-old facility.
Washington takes the concept to the next level. Ball walls have different graphics to support a variety of learning ideas. Two basketball courts have full “fraction ball” graphics. LPA developed a color palette and custom graphics for several new games. Hopscotch boards teach music notes or basic plant structure; vertical ball walls offer lessons in volume and distance calculations.
“Everything was very intentional with the idea of the learning that could happen in this space,” Cogan says. A handball court that lets students track their height growth is one of his favorites. “My son’s a fourth grader and loves handball, so I love watching the kids get into that.”
The spaces are activated for different roles and connect play areas and shared spaces to the surrounding buildings to form a new heart of the campus.
The Bottom Line
For SAUSD, which was looking to stretch dollars, Learning Landscapes is already a win. The play area is value-added space. And students are enthusiastically embracing the spaces.
“When I’m talking to them on the playground, they just can’t get enough of it,” Cogan says.
For Hunter and the landscape team, Learning Landscapes is another part of the toolkit. “We have the opportunity to curate them to each specific district and or school to fit within the overall context,” Hunter says.
The next step is deeper dive with educators, learning more about ways to integrate curriculums into the graphics and landscape spaces.
“We can design even more thoughtful and more directed learning landscape elements,” Hunter says. “That becomes the connection from the classroom to the outside,” Hunter says.
A 2022 study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found fourth to six graders who regularly used fraction ball in their studies demonstrated “significantly improved… rational number understanding as reflected by higher scores in overall accuracy, with positive impacts on several subtests.”
What have you learned about how to do this right?
One of the biggest ways that my own scholarship has evolved in the last couple of years is that we really center and focus on partnerships and really team up with the end users to design the spaces. In a school space, we want to deeply partner with teachers and students and families so that the community is represented.
Partners also bring deep expertise in their own areas. Teachers, for example, know their students, know their school community, know their learning objectives and their goals. To the extent that we can build from that asset to create spaces that respond to their goals and to their standards, that makes the installations more impactful, more likely to be used, more likely to be adopted. The same goes with students.
What are the best ways to get them involved?
There’s all kinds of design-based implementation research. There’s lots of jargon around it, but it’s basically a process of running participatory workshops or design sessions to surface core values and goals from the stakeholders, whether it be teachers, families, students. The goals become criteria or a checklist for us to say okay, this is meeting our curriculum standards and it’s meeting our developmental goals about being active, engaged and meaningful. And it’s meeting student goals. The more of the criterion goals that we’re meeting, the stronger we feel about our design.
What works and what doesn’t work in terms of designing these spaces?
One criteria that we always use is, first of all, minimal text and signage and words. Things have to be very intuitive and visually appealing. You have to look at it and be like oh, that’s awesome. I want to play with that. Nobody is going to read pamphlets and booklets and extensive signage. You’ve just got to be able to go and know how to play with it. We always ask, how do people naturally use it? We do a lot of play testing and quick mockups and have people try stuff. If it’s too complicated, usually those designs don’t last.
Then we have our criteria about what makes a great learning experience. We want things that are active, meaning hands on and minds on. It can’t just be a puzzle that you solve once and then it’s over. It’s going to be there every day, so you have to be able to approach it with new ways, ask new questions, tinker, and try different things. It’s got to be something flexible that you can continue to engage with. And kids are very creative. The last criteria and maybe the most important, is it should be joyful. It should be fun and kids should be excited about it.
