We where asked to provide some graphics for the playground of Tremona Road Childrens Centre

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As you can see these graphics will help to provide a hours of fun for Tremona Road Childrens Centre. For other examples of designs that you could have thermoplastic painted on yor play area visit our Thermoplastic line marking product page

Whenever a government decides its spending priorities, somebody pops up with the pronouncement: “Not one dime to subsidize the symphony (or the Olympics, or public art) while there are people visiting food banks.”

This “starve the symphony to feed the poor” rhetoric betrays the underlying prejudice of its advocates, which is that art (or sport) is unimportant in the face of suffering, although history tells us the opposite. Art endures even in concentration camps precisely because it is not a frivolity; it is essential to human life.

We’ve had a flurry of just such anti-sport rhetoric around the Olympics recently. So much money wasted on sport, goes the complaint — another useless frill for wealthy elites when the money could be spent on housing the homeless, improving life for aboriginal people, funding the arts, buying more parkland, paying for hip replacements — insert your own favourite cause here.

The selfish assumption is simple: Sport doesn’t matter to me, therefore sport doesn’t matter.

But sport does matter. It matters for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that virtually every government on the planet is deeply invested. Governments are invested not out of altruism, but out of self-preservation. They invest because sport matters so deeply to their citizens. Indeed, the study of sport, its origins and its cultural significance have now emerged as coherent sub-disciplines of anthropology, sociology and psychology.

A minority of idealists may think the masses have no taste, or are deluded, or have been duped and exploited by cynical promoters but this doesn’t alter the reality – sport matters to most people and has mattered since time immemorial. It has existed as long as humans can remember for the same reason that art does, because at some profound level humans can’t do without it.

Contests of stamina, strength, agility and intelligence are found in every culture and at every stage of development. The Inuit, the Aztecs, the Minoans, the Iroquois, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Sumerians, the Romans, the Nubians, the Mongols, the Celts, virtually every society celebrated public displays of these skills.

Such contests are mentioned in the world’s earliest literature. They occur in the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh, in the two Greek epics attributed to Homer, in the Anglo-Saxon epicBeowulf. Given their extensive presence in preliterate societies, it’s safe to assume these contests have an extraordinarily ancient pedigree. There’s archeological evidence of sport in Africa, the Middle East, China and North America as early as 4,000 years ago. These depictions and artifacts almost certainly descend from much earlier traditions.

Everywhere, games develop spontaneously among children at play. When those children grow up, they turn to games that are codified and formalized. If games spontaneously emerge in every society and if evidence of them is found at the dawn of human civilization, it seems plausible that sport is more than simply an invention of greedy capitalists and the idle bourgeoisie — it’s a fundamental part of what it means to be human.

Along with poetry, song, dance and storytelling, sport is probably one of the mother arts, incorporating elements of them all, as does its sister medium, the drama.

Governments are invested in sport not out of principle but out of pragmatism. They understand, as did the newly elected Nelson Mandela when he took office in a South Africa teetering at the brink of civil chaos and perhaps even race war, that “politics divide, sport unites.”

So governments support global events such as the Olympics, world championships in soccer, cricket, rugby, baseball, basketball, swimming, track and field, tennis, ping-pong, volleyball, hockey, skiing, and even tiddlywinks — along with the whole underlying structure of regional, national and local championships — because the state perceives sport’s unifying value in ameliorating the tensions of tribal, racial, ethnic, religious, regional and class differences.

Ordinary people love sport because it provides heroes with whom they can identify. These semi-deified figures prevail or fail in heroic circumstances.

People love sport because games are a thrilling story, which can be shared in real time. Sport is a social trope for resurrection in which the vanquished may die today but can always have another opportunity to be reborn in the next game.

People love sport because at its core, despite all the encrustations of sleaze and cynicism, sport remains suffused with a childlike innocence that gives fans permission to revert to childlike enthusiasms in an adult world of war, cruelty, injustice and burdensome obligations.

London Times writer Matthew Syed, who was named sports journalist of the year at the British Press Awards in 2009, summed up neatly why sport matters in a response to the murderous terrorist attack upon tiny Togo’s national soccer team at the African Cup in Angola earlier this year.

“Alongside love and art and friendship and merriment, sport is an essential ingredient of what Lucretius called the praemia vitae, the gifts of life,” Syed observed.

“This, of course, is one of the reasons why terrorists, particularly of the nihilistic perspective, are keen to target sport. They see in its innocence a profound and offensive frivolity. By targeting grand sporting occasions, they seek not only to secure a global platform for whatever maniacal cause they endorse, they also strike a blow against the praemia vitae. They take a little away from what makes life valuable, and, therefore, meaningful.”

And so governments support and endorse sport — some obsessively and at great expense — and defend it like their national sovereignty because their citizens love it and will not give it up.

Sport is important because, for all the flaws of greed, self-interest, dishonesty and cynicism – and let us remember that these are flaws of the human condition and are found in every human institution from labour unions to world churches to corporations to righteous non-government organizations – it belongs to the people in a way that not many things do.

There’s a lot of self-justifying talk from governments – witness the constant blather from British Columbia’s provincial and municipal governments – about the economic value of the Olympics. But governments don’t back sport simply for its economic value. They back it because it provides such a powerful tool for nation-building. Spectators, on the other hand, love sport because it offers mythic lessons in the great themes of life. Sport is about the rewards of courage, self-discipline and faith in oneself. Sport is unflinching proof that every hero’s fate – and by association our own — is ultimately one of defeat either by an opponent, by circumstance or by age. Sport reveals that victory and defeat balance the same equation, that there cannot be one without the other and that it’s important for the winner to honour the loser. Sport teaches humility. Sport demonstrates that time is the master of all. Sport reminds us that we all live in the fleeting moment and that at some point we, too, must arrive at that one last moment that is all we have and all we will ever have. Sport affirms the moment’s value.

The public response to sport is a measure of its importance.

Over the next couple of weeks, approximately half the population of the planet is expected to watch the Vancouver and Whistler Olympics on television. This audience isn’t coerced, it is self-selecting. The audience alone reflects a degree of interest that opponents of sport as spectacles prefer to ignore.

On any given day almost six million Canadians will be participating in some form of sport from organized competitive games to what statisticians call “active leisure,” which ranges from fitness walking to expedition hiking and includes such pursuits as jogging, kayaking and swimming.

Nor is this an exclusive activity for wealthy elites, as some critics would have us think. When Statistics Canada conducted a detailed survey published in 2007, it discovered that an astonishing two-thirds of aboriginal children participate regularly in sport, with 65 per cent under 14 playing sport outside school at least once a week.

Perhaps these Olympics and the heroes they will emulate belong to those kids as much as to anyone, despite the injustices of first nations poverty and Canada’s failure to address those injustices.

For a century or more, researchers have noted the positive contribution that sport, starting with those spontaneous playground games, makes to personal fitness and health. It also has other wide-reaching social benefits: the encouragement of leadership; the development of social skills; learning how to manage stressful situations; teaching that personal sacrifice in service of the group often brings greater rewards than simple self-interest – instruction in the virtues of socialism that makes an amusing irony of the accusation by some critics that sport is just a brutal capitalist tool.

Canadians know this instinctively; they don’t need to be informed by journalists.

More than 8.3 million of us aged 15 or older regularly participate in sport. Another 7.6 million of us regularly attend amateur and minor sporting events. More than 1.7 million volunteer as coaches. More than 900,000 volunteer as officials. More than1.7 million volunteer as administrators. And estimating from Statistics Canada tabulations of the first five years of this decade, by the end of 2010 we’ll have spent a cumulative total of close to $20 billion on our favourite spectator sports. That’s a voluntary tax in support of sport, if one wishes to consider it that way.

shume@islandnet.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Playground games for the Nintendo generation launched by university partnership

Clapping and skipping games that are popular in the school playground are to be converted into Wii-type computer games as part of a unique collaboration between three universities, the British Library and Nintendo.

The ambitious project, which involves the universities of London, Sheffield and East London, will generate prototype games similar to the Wii sports games played with handsets that take the place of tennis racquets or golf clubs.The development of Wii playground games, directed by Grethe Mitchell of the University of East London, is only one strand of a £600,000 project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Beyond Text programme.

Grethe Mitchell, senior lecturer in UEL’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, said: “Playground games and rhymes are evolving all the time. Our project aims to make this vital element of our cultural heritage accessible to the ‘Wii generation’.” The centre-piece of the project is the important collection of playground games and songs at the British Library: the sound archives of the renowned collectors Iona and Peter Opie. Researchers will convert these into a digital format under the supervision of Jonathan Robinson of the British Library.

They will then create an interactive website for the Library so that children, parents, educators and members of the public can access the digitised archives. The project’s third strand will be a two-year study of playground culture in two primary schools, one in London, the other in Sheffield. The London school is in the multi-ethnic King’s Cross area, close to the Library, while the Sheffield school serves a primarily white, working-class community.This strand, supervised by Professor Jackie Marsh of Sheffield University and Dr Rebekah Willett of the Institute of Education, University of London, will reveal how playground games, songs and rhymes are being influenced by comics, TV, film and computer games.

Children from the two schools will help to create the prototype computer games and design the library website. They will also co-curate the website, helping to select, describe and present its contents.The project is being backed by the former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, who is a member of its advisory panel, and by Iona Opie, whose archive at the British Library is central to the research.Ends.UEL Press office contact: 0208 223 6239 or 07595 056245Return to top

Notes to Editors

The University of East London (UEL) is a global learning community with over 23,000 students from over 120 countries world-wide. Our vision is to achieve recognition, both nationally and internationally, as a successful and inclusive regional university proud of its diversity, committed to new modes of learning which focus on students and enhance their employability, and renowned for our contribution to social, cultural and economic development, especially through our research and scholarship. We have a strong track-record in widening participation and working with industry

How games change

Duck, Duck, Goose. Red Rover, Mother, May I? Playground games we played on Oak Hill Elementary School’s red dirt ball field a half a century ago were such fun during our “play” period.

These organized activities used our minds as well as our physical abilities

In the early 1950s, Oak Hill School had no playground equipment, but my father and Gary Hammond’s senior agriculture students welded together a merry-go-round, see-saws and two jungle gyms that lasted well into the 1970′s.

When there were too few kids for some of the group games, we played Marbles, Tag, Simon Says. When we were at home we splashed in mud puddles and sailed boats of wood with toothpick masts. Without sounding too whiny about not having toys, we sometimes tossed dry cow pies or rocks.

Yes, we used the ‘b’ word. We got bored. We quickly learned not to mention that word to our parents.

“I can find you something to do. It’s called chores. What about it?”

We ran outside and created something fun. Sticks made great guns or swords. We used our imaginations and survived.

Television only showed cartoons on Saturday mornings on one of the three channels we received. Transistor radios soon allowed portable listening to popular music.

Soon after my two sons were born, an amazing device was introduced into the eager hands of America’s youth: Atari. Colored squares on a television screen that were moved by the hand-held controller. Frogger and Pac-Man were the first games we watched as friends played. But technology was on a roll. Nintendo and Sega soon followed. Personal computers and their games were great, too.

There were adventure games, learning games and action games. Whereas we imagined our own adventures with sticks for swords and the family dog as a ferocious dragon, kids could now be in the middle of a realistic battle for the fate of the world. Players could put themselves in the role of hero as in the Zelda series games. (I loved to play that one.) Puzzle games like Tetris and Columns became frustrating, but made the distraught loser want to play again and again.

Sometimes games seemed addictive, resulting in sore thumbs for the player from the constant pressing the directional button. It also helped if the player leaned in the direction they wanted the character to go. Leaning to one side while playing a race car game made going around a curve much easier. Not really, but it seemed logical.

But our young people were missing out on the physical activities needed for their health. Slouched in front of a television or a computer was no exercise at all (except for strengthening thumbs)

Game designers are smart. They now have systems and games that require standing and going through the motions of batting, swinging or rolling a bowling ball. They offer exercise programs that let adults kiss the couch goodbye as well as the extra pounds. The system is called the Wii, which is short for Wireless inter-interface. But parents may use the spelling, ‘Whee!’ because it does get the kids on their feet for some exercise and fun. Because the games are so intense, some players stay up until the ‘wee’ hours of the morning to play.

The exercise dilemma for our youth is helped with the addition of motion game systems. When they add fresh air and sunshine from a little box in front of the television, then that will be the total game experience. The family dog may feel left out in his role-playing, but they may develop a system for him soon, a virtual reality fetch game.Debra Leigh Cloer is a member of the Morganton Writer’s group, an avid writer, grandmother of five and a lifelong resident of the Oak Hill community. (And plays the Wii with the grandchildren.)