Measure Playgrounds

In this guide, we're going to go through the measurement planning and measurement of a play area.

Playgrounds usually comprise of a fenced off perimeter for safety purposes and several play items (with their own boundary) within that perimeter. We can use Layers to measure both the outline and the inner areas and view them relative to each other and view the square meters separately for each. We however don't have to use layers if we're only interested in one area (e.g. the outline) or if we're not interested in viewing the individual area calculations of the inner structures. We can always add more layers to a measurement afterwards.

Here's a comprehensive tutorial showing how to measure a playground using Moasure:

We're going to measure up the playground below. We will use Layers to capture the individual areas. It comprises of:

1. A perimeter (not fenced-off).

2. Several elevated areas that house the toys (e.g. swing, sea-saw, locomotive)

3. Some pathways.

Playground

We're going to start by measuring the separate structures that house the toys. We will use Closed Shape as the Measurement Type and Straight Line as the Path Type as the areas don't have curvatures. With Layers, we have to remember the first 2 points of our initial measurement layer (the Base Layer). When we add a new layer, we have to go back to the start of the first point of the Base Layer and then to the second point of the Base Layer before we start measuring our Second Layer. This is required to correctly orient the measurement layers in relation to each other. Once we have captured the two reference points, we can walk to the start of our Second Layer (this will automatically be set to Ignore Line so that the path is not actually captured). The app will prompt you to go to the start and second point of the base layer each time you start a new layer measurement. It's recommended to place something in/on the ground to remember the two points.

Once the structures are measured, we're going to measure the perimeter using a combination of different Path Types to suit the required shapes.