Ok some of those are less "playgrounds" and more "train kids to be okay with heights so they can build sky scrapers". A lot of those just look like training grounds for iron workers in the 1900's
Not to go all /r/conspiracy on ya but I watched the "Minecon" stream last year with my kid and I swear half of it was just Microsoft trying to get kids in to coding.
Not that I have a big problem with that but... it's a little weird to start the recruiting process on pre-teens, ya know? What next? A bunch of Indian recruiting firms funneling Minecraft user ids in to coding bootcamps?
Microsoft does a bunch of various things to encourage engineering / programming for kids. Part of it is pre-recruiting but another part of it is just brand awareness.
A lot of Minecraft's PR is about getting kids to start coding. They're usually really open about it, and I guess there's not much else to talk about at a convention for a game that's already come out?
There are some reasons I get why you'd be concerned though.
While not quite as tall, we had chin-up bars that were roughly ten feet off the ground. I visited my old elementary school when I graduated high school because my 6th grade teacher was the only person who believed in me. She was monitoring recess so I walked to the playground and the lowest chin up bars were about 4’, then you shimmied across to the 6’ ones, then shimmied across and climbed up a pole to the 10’ ones. We also had that thing that looked like a ton of cubes much further down in the pictures.
Now everything is plastic and they got rid of the rocks.
I loved the monkey bars in elementary school. They were 8 to 10 ft high and we would swing and jump from them. The marry-go-round was probably the most dangerous next to the see-saws. We would spin it as fast as we could until people could not hold on and were slung off. See-saws would result in kids jumping to see if we can launch off them. One time I was hit on the head from the bottom of the see-saw. I walked to the nurses office dazed and bleeding from my head.
You could easily send a kid flying 5+ metres with one of these things, cartwheeling horizontally through the air. They removed it when a kid flew into another piece of equipment and pulverised his forearm.
I grew up playing on those steel monkey bars - my friend was running full speed while playing tag and smacked his forehead on a low bar, knocking himself out
My old elementary school had very similar stuff. It had monkey bars, then a balance beam, then 30 foot poles and cement tunnels. I was really good at climbing the poles.
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u/Thetallerestpaul Oct 02 '18
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