Jockey Club CoolPlay Exploration Kit: Light and Shadow

Funded by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, the second phase of the Jockey Club CoolPlay Project is co-organised by Yew Chung College of Early Childhood Education and Hong Kong Christian Service. AaaM collaborated with YCCECE to design the fourth Exploration Kit, translating light and shadow into a portable learning tool for home, outdoor and repeated play.
Familiar settings shape the journey: houses, animals, a grassland and a theatre. Windows, stages, routes, distances and viewing angles become starting points for discovery. Children open, move, rotate and rearrange the pieces, observing how shadows change in shape, scale, colour and direction.

Shadow Play in the Grassland Houses begins with four houses featuring different window shapes. Children match animal patterns with the windows, then introduce coloured filters and a light source. The activity opens up ideas of transparency, obstruction, shape and colour.
In Grassland Theatre, the box unfolds into a small stage. Moving the animal cards and flashlight closer to or further from the screen changes the shadows. Parents and children can take turns as performers, lighting operators and audience members, adding scenery sheets and drawings to create their own performance.
Animals Meet on Mirror Grassland introduces reflection through a route-finding game. Children adjust the mirrors to locate animals across the grassland. More mirrors create longer reflection paths, bringing direction, spatial relationships and problem-solving into play.

Each activity begins with open questions: What changes when the window opens? How can the shadow become larger? Where will the animal appear when the mirror turns?
Parents observe alongside the child, encourage predictions and allow comparison and repetition to shape the next question. The kit provides a clear starting point while leaving room for children to alter the play. Animals become story characters, houses can be rearranged, new scenery can be drawn and mirrors can form different routes.

The booklet’s Travel Around sections carry the ideas beyond the tabletop. Children are encouraged to observe coloured shadows beneath waterfront sunshades, compare shadows at beaches and parks, create performances on community stages, and look for reflections in household mirrors, shopping-mall lifts and museum kaleidoscopes.
Sunlight, architecture, public space and familiar objects become further learning materials. Activity videos, the online exploratory-learning platform and suggested picture books help one play session develop into continued observation, conversation and reading.

CoolPlay places exploratory learning within everyday activities, materials and real-life settings. Its approach connects family participation with school and community learning through multisensory experience, hands-on discovery and guided play.
AaaM brought an architectural and spatial lens to the toolkit, organising scientific ideas through scenes that children can move, rearrange and perform. Once opened, the box becomes a small landscape. Windows, a stage and mirrors make the movement of light visible, giving young children a place to begin asking how the world around them works.