Introduction: Play equipment assumes an important role as a play setting, and it is reported that it affects the physical and mental development of children. Therefore, new indoor play equipment has been developed in recent years. Yet, there have been few studies on the effectiveness of indoor play equipment on the qualitative transformation of their fundamental movements. We therefore aimed to clarify how it changed children's fundamental movements in this study.
Methods: Subjects were 23 four-year-old children in a kindergarten (10 boys and 13 girls). They were classified into two groups: the play group of 11 children (four boys and seven girls) and the non-play group of 12 children (six boys and six girls). Children in the play group were asked to conduct free play by using indoor equipment installed in a commercial facility near the kindergarten for one hour one time a week over two and a half months. Only 11 children in the play group and nursery teachers were permitted to use indoor equipment freely. Children in the non-play group were asked to conduct free-play with nursery teachers in the kindergarten play room or yard for an hour on the same period. We examined their forward rolling, jumping, and throwing as the fundamental movements. We scored subjects' developmental stage of movement by using an observational evaluation method. Fisher's exact test was conducted for measuring the change ratio of developmental stage of movement among children in the play and non-play groups. We also performed two-factor analysis of variance whose dependent variable was the score of movement, and whose factors were the group and the measuring period.
Results: Boys' change ratio of the forward rolling movement and the jumping movement were higher in the play group than in the non-play group. In addition, the score of boys' forward rolling movement became higher in the play group than in the non-play group at a statistically significant level. There was no significant difference on other items.
Conclusion: This research showed that free play with the use of indoor equipment is expected to promote the boys' development of the forward rolling movement and jumping movement. Yet, any noticeable development was not observed in other basic movements, suggesting the necessity to improve the quality of indoor play equipment.