The Future of Play

I never imagined that our YouTube channel would eventually land our family the opportunity to appear on TV – but this month – we all made our small screen debut when we were featured in a television documentary series called “When We Play” on Channel News Asia! The production company reached out to us after chancing upon our channel, and despite my initial reluctance, the rest of the Chu clan decided it was too unusual an opportunity to pass up!

Our family were included in the 5th episode of the series, entitled “The Future of Play”, which focused on the rise of digital technology in children’s play, its impact on how we play together, and our aspirations for the future of play. As the channel airs across the whole of Asia, the documentary series also included families and stories from several other Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.

So in December last year we were filmed visiting the updated Futureworld exhibition at the Art Science museum (which I made a video about after our very first visit a few years ago) and also had the TV crew round to our home and a local park. Daddy Chu and I nervously rambled away through a 45 minute interview, the girls showed off some of their newly-acquired coding skills and we all got some fascinating behind-the-scenes insight into the TV production process.

We had to wait until March this year to see the final result, and were relieved to find we sounded reasonably sane on camera, and that our thoughts and opinions were not manipulated to fit some preconceived storyline but were presented more or less as we had intended. It was nerve-racking but quite exciting to see our whole family together on screen and get our YouTube channel featured too!

This episode featured quite a few interesting “digital playgrounds” across Asia, amidst a discussion about indoor technology-driven play and the need for children to continue to connect with nature and the outdoors. Unfortunately I can’t upload the episode to the blog, but for a while you can view it along with the other episodes on the Channel News Asia website here.

So in keeping with the theme we made a video on Superpark Singapore this month, Singapore’s newest indoor playground, which incidentally is the brainchild of a Finnish parent.

It made a huge difference that we visited on a Tuesday afternoon, because it was wonderfully quiet. I’d seen a few videos and photos by reviewers and it always looked painfully crowded. There were other kids (and quite a few adults!) there, but we didn’t have to queue for a single activity and the girls totally had the run of the place. I think it would be a very different experience if you have to queue for everything and only have a limited time once you’re in.  

The girls have enjoyed Bounce, Clip n Climb, Forest Adventure, and various softplay and gaming arcades in Singapore but Superpark is like a giant all-in-one. Although the play area for each activity is considerably smaller, you can’t beat this place for the sheer range of activities. We tried to cover most of them in the video but even with the place to ourselves we couldn’t finish doing the lot and some areas are only suitable for older kids. Superpark is ideal for trying out a whole range of games and sporting activities and the surprisingly large number of staff keep things very safe and orderly.

There are 3 main areas – Adventure Area (playground and obstacle course activities), Game Arena (mostly ball games) and the Freestyle Hall (with a skate n scoot park, trampolining and various wall-climbing activities). 

A few of the activities are hybrid physical-digital games, like the augmented reality climbing wall, but the best of these (and the girls’ favourite thing in the whole park) was Valo Jump – an interactive trampolining game – essentially an arcade-style computer game with digital sensors so you move your avatar by bouncing around! There were 2 games to choose from and the girls went back for this one several times. If this is The Future of Play, it’s all looking rather fun.