KOCHI: What can you play anywhere, anytime, with anybody and any number of kids? Surprisingly, it needs no screen or battery charge. Not even wi-fi or data pack! Cool, isn’t it? It’s the good ol’ hopscotch that not many kids play today.
A game that seems to have got crushed by CandyCrush and TempleRun, this one has always been a classic game that can be played outdoors and indoors.
Known as thokkudu billa in Telugu, Kunte bille in Kannada and Paandi in Tamil Nadu, it’s essentially a game where you draw 3 rectangles (or circles) one above the other, two sets of two joint squares attached to yet another triangle. Players throw a small disc or coin into the first box, hop across the box without touching it, go through every box hopping and land on both legs in the fourth and sixth, turn around and come back.
In the second phase, the disc is thrown to the second and the process is repeated. If the player lands on the wrong box or touches the line while hopping, he/she is ousted. The one who stays on the longest is the winner. Then there are local variations that one gets extra points to skip two boxes at the same time etc.
“Although ours is a Montessori playschool and we pretty much have lots of western concepts during the playtime in the summer camp, we made sure we had such traditional games for our kids,” said Pallavi Rao who runs Oi, a prominent playschool chain in the country.
This game encourages physical activity, sharp vision, balance and of course provides them fun. “It is refreshing to see children play these games their parents played. In fact, when we had the game drawn in our play area, we had a few parents also take a shot at it,” she says.
There’s even a YouTube video showing ‘How to play hopscotch’! “It is not just a local game, it is played abroad too...in Rome, Germany, Italy and Australia. I am surprised why it hasn’t managed to stay on here,” says Vanaja Markapuram, a professor of management and a mother of two toddlers. A person weighing 70 kg hopping for five minutes will burn up to 50 calories. Imagine what it can do to the lightweight tweens who barely weigh 20 kg!
Psychologists believe that outdoor games give kids the much-needed sunshine and fresh air. “Unfortunately, kids seem to find more stimulation on digital games like TempleRun and BikeRacer. The only way to ensure such classic games survive is to play,” says Radhika Acharya.
So next time you throw a birthday party or pot luck or even visit a resort with the family in tow, take a stone, carve out these boxes and get playing Hopscotch!