September 2009 | Back to News
On September 16, a new 39,000-square-foot playground opened at the Mary McLeod Bethune Academy (M.S. 394) in Brooklyn. This forward-thinking, collaborative effort filled a once barren asphalt lot with athletic facilities, brightly painted surfaces, meeting areas, and specially selected play equipment for exploring aspects of physics and weather. M.S. 394, a K–8 public school in Crown Heights, was designated as one of 290 schools to participate in “Schoolyards to Playgrounds,” a project of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative. As a part of the greater plan to create a greener city by 2030, Schoolyards to Playgrounds helps achieve the City’s goal to create open space within easy reach of every New Yorker.
PlayLab is collaborating with organizations citywide to develop some of these playgrounds with a focus on science. For the Science Playground Flagship at M.S. 394, the PlayLab team engaged CUNY's NOAA-Cooperative Remote Sensing Science & Technology (CREST) Center, which donated a WeatherBug weather station that students can use to track and broadcast live meteorological readings as part of a national reporting system. NOAA-CREST is further supporting the school through science education outreach and enrichment, targeted to students in the sixth through eighth grades.
M.S. 394 was selected as the flagship location by the PlayLab team together with the New York City Department of Education and the Trust for Public Land because of the school’s commitment to science learning. Sixth graders and school administrators collaborated with PlayLab, the Trust for Public Land, and landscape architects from Mark K. Morrison Associates to identify the theme and play equipment that best support the school’s science-education goals. The “Secrets of Science” playground features equipment and curriculum connections from the SciencePlay catalogue, a tool developed by the PlayLab team to help schools create playgrounds that foster scientific thinking.
Read news coverage of the Flagship Science Playground opening here.
For more information about PlayLab please contact NTTL at notimetolose@jcca-nyc.com.