THE LABIRYNTH OF THE MAGIKME

MagikMe initiative aims to bring the experience of playing together even to severely disabled children who are not able to use the few integrated playground equipment available.
When we first came up with the idea of an integrated playground, for a few minutes I thought that we invented something that’s absolutely new. Then it turned out the world is full of them, only Hungary is lacking these playgrounds. In the United States there are lots of them, in Western-Europe as well, so calling it an invention would be like calling building a skyscraper in Hungary an invention.
But despite all this what we came up with is unique. For example our Labyrinth can be used by even severely disabled and massively injured children who can’t sit, hold their heads or aren’t able to use their hands skillfully and easily. What’s really special about our devices is that children are able to safely play with them without the use of their pram or wheelchair.
The advantage of this is that it provides a more intensive physical experience to the disabled children – until the child is not too heavy to be lifted from the wheelchair into the playing device. Adding their self-induced exercise to the other children’s efforts they can all play together. Secondly this allows for way more positions to be used, for example a belly-band position is more advantageous than passive sitting. Good posture can be developmental in itself, this way even though children might only think they went down to the playground, actually they did serious exercise.
These were the principals when we developed the concept of the Labyrinth with our engineers. This is a seesaw on hard springs with four seats and with a labyrinth in the middle of the device. Two of the seats are designed for severely disabled children to lay on them. The rest of the seats are for able-bodied children. The aim of the game is to move the seesaw together in order to get the small boat into the middle of the labyrinth. If they manage it it’s hurray and victory. If not, they had a good time together while they learnt a lot about accepting differences and about the joy of playing together.
We strongly believe that this is important for both groups of children because we believe that nothing can bring two points of view closer to each other than getting to know each other and having common experience – and the earlier age we start with this the better.