Intricate Database of Awesome Playgrounds 🚸
A long time ago, before our oldest kids were in school, my wife and I were trying to decide where to settle down. We had decided that we wanted to buy a house, which I thought was a pretty big commitment. As a certifiable nerd, I wanted to make the best possible decision with the information I had. Well "unfortunately" I had a fair bit of information available. This led to the creation of one of the most insane spreadsheets I've ever created, and ultimately a web-app that I sold to a real estate company.
But today, I just want to talk about one column of that spreadsheet...playgrounds. I don't think anyone would argue against all the great benefits of playing in playgrounds: health, fitness, fun, breaks during road-trips, picnics, physical learning, confidence, sport, socialization, outdoor time, prep for the zombie apocalypse (or other disasters), and again FUN. But how do you find the best ones??
Table of Contents
Finding the Best Playgrounds
Objective Playground Ranking System
The Nerdy Parent Playground Database
Finding the Best Playgrounds
To decide where to live, I wanted to make sure there were a few decent playgrounds nearby.
Even way back in 2014 there was a publicly accessible dataset of many of the city-run playgrounds. If you live in Edmonton, did you know your city has an open dataset of playgrounds? Likely other cities have this type of dataset too. Since then, this dataset has drastically improved, although there are still a few issues with it. For example, they count every separate area of sand as a separate playground with its own row in the data. This dataset also doesn't include many of the school playgrounds.
Also, since then, there have been many parent blogs popping up that write posts about playgrounds. Raising Edmonton has a decent one, although the title "In Edmonton" is a bit misleading, since most of them are in surrounding areas.
I've also recently come across my new favourite source for playground inspiration in Edmonton (and surrounding area), the Instagram account @edmontonplaygrounds.
If you're on a road trip and looking for a good place to let the kids run around a bit and stretch their legs, I typically look on Google maps for a green (park) zone, then switch to satellite mode or Street View to check if there is a playground in that green area.
But none of these methods for finding playgrounds is particularly rigorous. The dataset doesn't have pictures or any ranking or size numbers. The blogs and Instagram accounts also don't tend to have that kind of data, although they usually at least have photos.
Objective Playground Ranking System
The other issue with the Edmonton Open Dataset on playgrounds was that I didn't just want to know if there was a playground nearby, I wanted to know if it was a GOOD playground...