Based on a study of 149 parochial-school students enrolled in kindergarten through eighth grade, this article explores children’s outdoor recess activities in an urban setting—with a focus on how age, gender, and size of play group influence their outdoor play preferences—and examines changes in children’s activity preferences over a single recess period. The majority of the children in the stu...

After radioactive incidents, the exposure risk in daily activities among children is a major public concern. However, there are limited methods available for evaluation of this risk, which is essential to future health risk management. To this end, this study assessed the relationship between behavioral patterns of school children and radiation exposure for a period of 18-20 months following th...

Geographic information systems traditionally dealt with only outdoor spaces. In recent years, indoor spatial information systems have started to attract attention partly due to the increasing use of receptor devices (e.g., RFID readers or wireless sensor networks) in both outdoor and indoor spaces. Applications that employ these devices are expected to span uniformly and supply seamless functio...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there is a bi-directional relationship between sleep characteristics (time in bed, sleep duration, sleep chronology, and sleep efficiency) and time spent participating in outdoor active play among children. METHODS Participants consisted of 433 children aged 10-13 years from Kingston, ON, Canada. Time in bed, sleep duration, slee...

In order to meet ambitious emission reduction goals in California, greenhouse gas emissions from direct combustion of fossil fuels for residential space and water heating will need to be largely eliminated. If those emission reductions come from fuel switching (natural gas to electricity) then the electricity grid needs to be prepared for the additional load. This paper presents a new method fo...

OBJECTIVES Our study sought to examine associations between the content of outdoor advertising and neighborhood ethnic/racial and socioeconomic composition to see whether particular communities disproportionately host harmful content. METHODS We constructed a spatial database of photographs taken from June 2012 until December 2012 in 7 identically zoned communities in Los Angeles, California,...

In this paper, we present Moles and Mini Moles, a combination of learning software tools that serve in bridging the gap between inside and outside classroom learning experiences. Secondary school students use these tools for hypothesizing, transferring, and testing lessons learned in the classroom into their physical environment. In particular, students use Moles and Mini Moles to create intera...

Background It is obvious that most of informal learnings of social skills and constructive plays occur in school yards and play-fields where children spend much of their non-official time of teaching. This study aimed to investigate the impact of schools' open space on learning and educational achievement of elementary students in Ahvaz, Southwest of Iran. Materials and Methods At a cross-secti...

A diverse, cross-sectorial group of partners, stakeholders and researchers, collaborated to develop an evidence-informed Position Statement on active outdoor play for children aged 3-12 years. The Position Statement was created in response to practitioner, academic, legal, insurance and public debate, dialogue and disagreement on the relative benefits and harms of active (including risky) outdo...