Wisdom playground in the local child development center: post occupancy evaluation and improvement guideline

Abstract

In 2017, the government of Thailand had declared the Thailand 4.0 policy, which one of the policies in social well-being is creating a society and moving forward without leaving anyone behind (inclusive society). Department of Local Administration has aimed to promote and support the children in the local child development center to have proper early childhood developments in 4 sides such as physics, emotion, social function, and intelligence via building the wisdom playground in the local child development center. Therefore the Department of Local Administration, Ministry of Interior had issued a policy and set aside the budgets to build “Wisdom Playground” at numerous local child development centers with an intention to apply to all 19,429 centers. One part of our research aimed to study and evaluate post occupancy evaluation of a child development center with the wisdom playground in order to find the benefits, usages, shortcoming problems, and improvement guideline for this policy. And the findings are the wisdom playground benefits children development through play. However, there are problems in design standard, safety, construction, budget, and maintenance.  The government agency should develop several optional standard construction drawings for implementation, and provide sufficient funding for construction and maintenance.