Redefining The Space Through Play Interpreting Child’s Experience in Primary Schools Through a Comparative Analysis of Interfacing Spaces

Child-space interaction is fundamental for experiencing and learning the environment and it first occurs in kindergartens and then in primary schools, where children explore more freely by spreading to wider boundaries than home. Beside their daily experiences, the most effective activity for the child to experience school is play. In addition to learning of the space by play, these spaces are reproduced and interpreted with the child's imagination throughout the play. On this basis, the indoor and outdoor spaces and their interfacing spaces in a school structure have a key role. In this framework, this study aims to examine the relation between the spatial configuration and the child's use of space within the scope of indoor-outdoor interfacing spaces. The field studies were carried out in two primary schools in Istanbul-Turkey, which have the same education model but are differentiated in terms of the configurative characteristics of their indoor-outdoor interfacing spaces. Analyzed data is collected based on perception, experience, and remembering. These interfaces were analyzed according to visibility and knee level accessibility possibilities. The syntactic data, usage and remembering frequencies of interfaces, and play variety were all interpreted by regression analysis. In conclusion, the correlations through conducted data at indoor-outdoor interfaces with different characteristics in both schools showed that visibility and knee level accessibility between indoor and outdoor spaces as well as the morphology of spaces in terms of its geometry affect the use of the space. Therewithal, children's recall of spaces, their activities in spaces, and the way they reproduce the space through play are also related to the configuration of the space.