Playground equipment design as the enhancement tool for the perceptual skill of slow learner children in Malaysia / Mohd Daniel Mohd Idros

In many schools around the country, there will be a few students that facing a problem in the learning process. They are much backward compared to the peers in terms of academic and non-academic performance. These types of children are commonly being called as slow learner students. ‘Play’ has long been known to contribute to the cognitive, social, and emotional development of all children. Play is a key element of learning. However, these situations (borderline intelligence) are considered by most people especially researcher and clinicians as a normal variant of intelligence worth little effort. This research indirectly will help the slow learners to enhance their learning process. It also benefits the learning educational system in setting guideline and requirements to best suit the development of children. The new knowledge gained will benefit the Malaysia design industry such as the data could be used as a guideline in designing playground equipment to pull the niche market which will encourage design economic. The majority of existing literature focuses on improving the physical space by the design or equipment of the playground for children with disabilities. However, there lack of research combining two aspects in one framework. The phenomenological research methodology or the qualitative form of research is found to be suitable for this study. In this view, every event is conditioned by variables such as time, location and culture, which are interactive, and, therefore, no situations, by definition, can be identical and cannot be the basis for generalization. In order to answer the research objectives, field ethnography method will be used which the sampling in this study will be observed by a researcher while they go about playing on the playground.