Tracing Smiles Park

About This Project

Tracing Spaces at the Agustín García Padilla School consists of an intensive educational program, where the TEP team traveled for a week to the community of El Rincón in the state of Sucre, to work in alliance with the San José Foundation. This program will be developed in two parts: the first part in Imagine how it could be a park for the school; and the second in Transform, that is to say, to construct the park that the participants imagined.

The Imagine stage consisted of several activities where the 44 participants, 5th and 6th graders, imagined what a park could look like in the school. To begin, the students carried out graphic surveys to the rest of the student community to know what were their favorite games and what elements had the park of their dreams.

Then the young people learned to use the tape measure and to draw in the proportion of the games and elements that prevailed in the surveys. The most popular games are soccer, jumping rope, airplane, spinning top and marbles; the favorite items of the respondents are swings, slides, seesaws, spinning wheels and climbing walls.

The next activity consisted of making some collages where the participants divided into groups, shaped with clippings of magazines how the environment of the park would look and where the elements that make it up would be placed. Finally, to close this week full of creativity, each group made a scale model of the site chosen for the park, filling it with proposals to transform the schoolyard into a park.

Each team presented their ideas and models to the rest of the student community who voted for their favorite elements and surfaces. Now the TEP Team returns to Caracas to transform the winning ideas of the models into technical construction plans. Soon we will return to El Rincón to build the new park for the Agustín García Padilla School designed by 5th and 6th graders!