Tough on play, tough on the causes of play
A short-term government website called "Build your PlaySpace" designed to get children involved with a consultation on play cost £50,000 plus VAT to build but attracted just 9,286 visitors.
According to a government spokesman, "Build your PlaySpace is an interactive tool to engage children and young people in the fair play consultation in a fun and interactive way. The tool is one strand of a wider consultation strategy that includes an activity poster/competition for children and young people, live events to encourage local dialogue with children, young people, their families and practitioners and written consultation."
With less than 10,000 visitors, the site has cost more than £5 per visitor, and it is not even clear if all these visitors were part of the target audience for the site, whether or not they were all from the UK, or whether this has excluded the visits from the site owners themselves, the journalists wondering how the £50,000 had been spent, and the myriad of robot visitors which crawl websites each day masquerading as humans.
The site included a questionnaire but having studied the questions, I feel it was biased towards reaching certain conclusions. For example, one question was "What stops you spending time outdoors?" and the only options were: Nowhere to go/nothing to do; It's not safe; Things cost too much; I prefer to stay at home. It neglects some of the more obvious reasons such as bad weather, too much homework and paranoid parents who won't let them step outside the front door. The question doesn't ask if kids spend enough time outdoors; it implies it. Indeed, one has to ask how many kids really would complete this survey and give their own views, and how many responses are actually the dogmatic views of the parents.
Do children need officialdom to help them play? The government seems to think so. It plans spend £235 million in the next three years on helping children play. I hope it spends that money, our money, more wisely than it did on this website exercise.
15th August 2008
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.