Remember those fun days back when you were a kid playing on the playground, back when playgrounds were cool and could hurt you just as much as they could make you active. They were made of wood, rusted metal and old tires and were, without a better expression, freakin’ awesome.

Nowadays playgrounds are becoming fewer and the ones that are made look more like something you would see at a preschool.

Where’s our cool wheel that made us feel like we were driving the playground, huh?

The weakness of today’s playgrounds aren’t really the issue at hand though, rather it’s the lack of playgrounds that maximize activity by children. They seem to be designed more for socializing and sitting rather than exerting any actual aerobic activity.

When we were kids, the monkey bars were 15 feet off the ground and you couldn’t fall, because if you did it hurt.

The College of Design, aligning with other neighboring institutions, is trying to remedy the absence of exercise in children’s daily lives and we salute them for it.

In this video game and Chester Cheeto world where children would rather sit to the side and trade Yu-Gi-Oh cards than work up a sweat playing on a playground, we need all the help we can get to get these kids moving. Their designs will incorporate fewer places for children to sit and more areas for physical activity, which is exactly what they need.

But the idea of juvenile obesity actually has many parallels to college students today. Yeah, Halo is fun to play and talking on Instant Messenger all day is cool, but where is the activity? Where is the jogging or playing sports?

Students rely too heavily on electronics as their source of relaxation and should instead find ways to be active outdoors, which is a much better way to blow off steam than hunting opponents on an Xbox.

We are taking a stand about this issue and proposing jungle gyms on the N.C. State campus, designed and built for college students. And we aren’t talking about the sissy jungle gyms that are made for kids today. We want the jungle gyms of our youth, with a tire gauntlet and rocks on the ground instead of shredded tires like those they have at schools today. We want to skin our knees and have a good time all while getting some exercise and fresh air.