Learning Landscape

by Jill Yoe Graves

Posted here are pictures of Project H’s pilot program for Learning Landscape at Kutamba School for AIDS Orphans in Uganda. The Learning Landscape uses a grid-based design in an outdoor space to elementary math (“including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, as well as spatial and logical reasoning through individual and team-based competition”). However, in the four installed Learning Landscape projects that followed, teachers adapted the system for geography, language arts, and science material. In fact, the design itself encouraged teachers and students to work and develop their own games. When the game is not in use, benches can be placed over the tires (old, unused and found locally) to create an outdoor classroom.

What I think is so special about this project is that it makes more aware of how we can learn from the spaces and objects around us.

When BLDG BLOG discussed Project H’s Learning Landscape they connected the project to an exhibit at the Institute for Figuring that I feel is worth mentioning here. Here is a section of their write-up:

In an unbelievably interesting exhibition held two years ago in Pasadena, the Institute For Figuring explored the educational system of a now relatively under-known man named Friedrich Froebel and his influence on what we now call kindergarten. To quote from their online exhibition at length:

Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.

I don’t mean to imply here that Project H’s “math playground” in Uganda is an example of Froebelian education – because, as far as I’m aware, it is not – but I do mean to say that it would be amazingly cool if the spatial environments of modern life were organized more along educational lines.

*Here is a link to Project H Design’s Photostream on Flickr