Support characters can be incredibly important to a well-balanced party when designed well, and that is exactly the role Giatta from Avowed seeks to fill in Obsidians newest RPG set in the world of Pillars of Eternity. That said, not all support-type characters are created equally, which raises the question: does Giatta have what it takes to stand among the best?

One Piece is an incredibly large series, full of tons of interesting characters and locations. Due to this, at times, it can be difficult to find a proper place for every character to have their time to shine. Although something like this may seem detrimental to One Piece in the long run, strangely enough, all it does is create more hype for highly anticipated characters that fans want to see in the spotlight once again.

How you feel about the finale of Critical Roles third main campaign hinges a lot on what you think Critical Role and actual play, and maybe even TTRPGs is about. Is it an extended worldbuilding exercise? Is it a story told? Is it a game played? Is it just content made by your parasocial faves?[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for episode 121 of Critical Roles Campaign 3, A New Age Begins. The video on demand is now available on YouTube, with audio-only podcast available on Thursday, Feb. 13.]If the measure of a good ending in actual play is the satisfaction of the players at the table, Critical Role ended with great success. Matthew Mercers table has always been, at its heart, a love letter to its players, and he has always insisted that they are the first and only audience he thinks about. Mercer ends every campaign with freeform epilogues that allow players control over the afterlives of their characters. And so if your pleasure is intimately tied to that of the cast, you join thousands who flooded live chat with joy that night.But its a disservice to Critical Role to reduce it to exclusively parasocial, sentimental pleasure. This is particularly true of a campaign that was logistically ambitious in its structures and design, that promised they were taking more chances. If Critical Role cannot be held up to any kind of critique, what actual play can? If we hope to talk seriously about actual play as something beyond content, as many now do, then we have to find a way to talk about quality, what elements succeed and which might not, and why. It may seem trivial, but the way we talk about Critical Roles ending, and on what grounds we argue about it, will have an impact on the future of actual play and all our expectations of it.Critical Role has had an outsized impact on the landscape of actual play. It wasnt the first, nor the most celebrity studded; but thanks to the timing of a variety of backstage and technological realities, savvy business choices, and extraordinary strokes of luck, it became a juggernaut. It is still a small (by Hollywood standards) set of media companies with a massive (by tabletop standards) impact. Where Critical Role steps, reverberations are felt by both devoted Critters and critics alike.I say this not as an outsider but one shaped by that impact. Critical Role is an important part of my scholarship, studying how Critters handled the enormous run time (in 2018 and then again in the 2020s) and editing close readings of actual play in major journals. Ive interviewed cast and crew, other creators who cite the show as a major influence, and many with opinions about the show without ever seeing an episode. It was the foundation of my role as a public critic, starting with a piece on the end of Campaign 1 published exactly three years ago this week and continuing into coverage on this site and beyond. Ive had undergraduates and senior (straight, male) colleagues express deep and baffling crushes on Liam OBrien. Im currently writing a book on actual play, which begins with Exandria Unlimited: Calamity, a masterpiece of the form.I have struggled with the question of aesthetic judgement for a long time. What is a good actual play? What makes one bad or mediocre versus not to my personal taste? These questions intersect with my prior scholarship on how expectations around endings evolve, and consensus on what makes a good ending changes over time. Debates about the ending of Critical Roles third campaign and the Exandria trilogy are already in high gear and are unlikely to end anytime soon.I dont know if I have many answers yet. But what Critical Roles finale reminded me is that actual play is built on a contract with its audience. Actual play can get away with far more than traditional forms and go to weird and wonderful places because the dice tell the story. Once you remove that, eliminating evidence of chance through editing or by loss of gameplay friction, the contract changes. Then, youre back to being judged by expectations from more traditional media. And thats where we end up as dice rolls begin to dwindle well before the game shifts into epilogue. Notable elements like Oryms fey-pact with the hag Fatestitcher were literally handwaved, no roll or even argument required. And as consequences receded, what has always felt like a complex, breathing world with light and shade, with adult themes that went beyond sex jokes and millennial references got just a little flatter, just a little more washed out by high-wattage brightness. In a game and show that had imbued player choices with heft, payoff felt thin on the ground or off in the far horizon.There are both critiques and defenses of those absences that seem counterproductive. For example, while the outbreak of the LA fires the first night of filming had some impact on the game, I dont think its the only or even the biggest reason for the tone of the ending. We also have to be careful about arguing over absences either by critiquing every plot point left unresolved, or by filling in explanations not presented to the audience. Critical Role has had great success in turning unresolved side plots into one-shot sequels, and the finale was a pointed exercise in establishing future hooks. At the same time, if we debate over the logics of the world and try to fill in such absences by debating what is reasonable, were no longer arguing about the story told or game played, but about the structure of the world created.If we take Critical Roles self-description as storytellers seriously (and I do), then we need to judge the story told. That means identifying essential parts of the narrative that emerged across 121 episodes, how they were handled, and the methods used to tell the story. Thats tricky for actual play, especially Critical Role, which does less preproduction plot strategizing than any of its peers. But its not impossible: there are still artistic choices being made.I often paraphrase Samuel Johnsons lines about super-long 18th-century novel Clarissa when talking about Critical Role: If you read it for the plot, you will hang yourself. You must read it for the sentiment. One of Critical Roles great strengths is the wealth of character studies crafted by Mercer and the founding cast. Critical Role reflects what The Retired Adventurer described as OC [Original Character]/Neo-Trad culture of play, which arose from fannish text-based role-playing forums and LiveJournal at the turn of the millennium. This style spotlights character interactions, treating characters as fully realized people rather than elements of a single contained artwork. This is also how fandom often treats characters, so its unsurprising Critical Role has a symbiotic relationship with fan work of all kinds that played a major role in growing the shows audience.While not all D&D players go as hard into the particular method of role-playing as these nerdy-ass voice actors, the loose rambling structures of much of Critical Role reflects how many folks now experience the shape of D&D. Its a game infamous for ending more often due to scheduling conflicts than narrative closure. There is a single campaign that has been running almost as long as Ive been alive, and Joe Manganiello takes his one character and throws it into any game he plays. Endings are hard in D&D precisely because they are rare, especially in extremely long-form play like Critical Role.And so when they do occur, DMs give them an enormous amount of weight. Mercer has repeatedly noted the extraordinary nature of what hes been able to build across the last decade and more. When speaking to my students in a TTRPG class in 2023, he likened the third campaign to his Avengers: Endgame.He knew, though audiences didnt, that Campaign 3 was designed as the final chapter of a trilogy, ending Exandrias Era of Reclamation and giving notable screen time to almost every player character across all three campaigns while not, say, killing fan-favorite Jester Lavorre before her wedding one-shot this fall at Radio City Music Hall.It also included many experiments: three of the campaigns player characters were introduced in the first Exandria Unlimited (EXU) miniseries led by Aabria Iyengar, paving the way for additional EXU miniseries tie-ins led by Iyengar and Brennan Lee Mulligan. A mid-campaign shake-up temporarily split the founding members across two different tables, introducing a half-dozen new guest players. Given the ways that Critical Role has repeatedly discussed plans to pass the torch, its hard not to read these innovations as part of a soft launch of new table compositions, perhaps taking more inspiration from its peer Dimension 20, whose original Intrepid Heroes now come together once a year for a batch-recorded 20-episode season.Bringing such a complex tale interwoven with two equally complex prior campaigns to a safe landing is a tall order for any DM, but especially one famous for letting players make their way as they please through a sprawling, detailed world. And so the campaign was marked by a persistent tension between the kind of rambling, character-centered style that had become a hallmark of Critical Role (especially in Campaign 2) and the increasing urgency of world-shaking events that demanded their attention and intervention a hallmark of Campaign 1, though now with much lower-level players. The prior two campaigns had also focused on final adversaries who wished to become gods. Campaign 3 pivots in an important way, focusing instead on a god-eater, and because that adversary was introduced early on (episode 43), the campaign became dominated by debates about the nature of divinity that ran in circles for dozens of episodes.This is where Critical Roles strength that Exandria often feels like a real, complex world collided with the needs of a D&D campaign (a clear adversary, clear plans of action, forward momentum). It was compounded by another appeal of the show: the vicarious pleasure audiences take from Mercers ability to surprise his players and the audience simultaneously (as noted in the campaigns theme song: who knows what will happen/he might). Because Mercer wants to craft a world that feels alive, and do so without robbing his players of the pleasures of discovery, he has to trust that those players will move the game forward without his guidance as they have done in the past.But the confused way D&D handles religion and divinity polytheism as imagined by midwestern American Protestants turned the question of how to handle this particular cosmic horror into a glue trap, paralyzing the players for dozens of hours of circular existential debates. Gods once mechanized (or digestible) become just another power bloc, and for players used to a system where in the end you are basically gods, the line gets blurrier still. And as D&Ds messy cosmology added friction to much of the campaign, D&Ds mechanics also dont have the necessary friction for the interpersonal beats that make Critical Role compelling. Players are left to improvise these on their own, which is why every campaign has ended with a largely freeform epilogue where Mercer plays the role of the worlds logics to provide necessary constraints.The resolution of romantic subplots were fascinatingly nuanced, working hard to feel realistic rather than fairy tale. But the effect is somewhat jarring against the brightly lit background of the rest of the campaigns resolution. Divine magic is not gone, nor are the powers of the Ruidus-born, and even Imogens time as a host of Predathos has not left a mark. Because there has always been a next campaign for Critical Role, as well as sequels, spinoffs, and more, many in the audience look ahead to C4 or some other place where narrative satisfaction and payoff will come.I dont think trilogies work that way. But platforms do and differentiating between what is part of the genre of actual play versus what is beyond it in scope is one of the ways we need to revise our understanding of what Critical Role is as it enters its second decade. Critical Role provided the template for a decade of actual play, from its visual layout to its branding as a bunch of friends playing RPGs in each others living rooms. It has positioned itself as an accident, a miracle which is, in a sense, true. The history of actual play is littered with compelling shows that never got an ending.As a new genre or form develops, audiences and artists develop alongside it. Reviews and debates are part of this process of growth and maturation. No living genre stays the same but adapts and changes over time. Critical Role is bigger than the actual play that started it all, and the form of actual play itself has also grown beyond its initial form.Most importantly, as we enter the second decade of Critical Role, its long past time for us to note that Critical Role, like every other successful actual play, isnt effortless; its the result of hard work and skill, by cast and crew. It is sprezzatura: the appearance of effortlessness that only comes from long training and long experience working together. Sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesnt, and all of it is now supported and smoothed because it is a platform, the basis for a massive transmedia web. Even if this third campaign doesnt end up with an animated adaptation like The Legend of Vox Machina and the upcoming Mighty Nein animated series, the players know they will return to these characters in prequels, sequels, world books, and more.If we talk about skill and work, focusing on the human-scale story rather than the platform world made, then we can have meaningful conversations meaningful critique that enrich us all. We might be able to imagine actual play beyond the system that is good for branding but not necessarily the best one for storytelling. And we might be able to do all as fellow players, rather than raising up new gods or (Dungeon) masters.

Brooklyn-based painter Jennifer J. Lees current exhibition The Falls reveals 11 new paintings at Klaus von Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. Lee continues to level-up her technique of painting photorealistically on jute burlap a fabric that is so coarse and porous that any representational image seems technically impossible, let alone capturing the perfection and resolution of digital images. All of it results in a profound elevation of the every day and invites the viewer to play in a world between pixels and material, illusion and physicality.Jennifer J. Lee: The Falls. Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, 2025Lee sources her images from the internet, using her iPad as she paints, thereby purposefully and directly translating glowing pixels into physical brushstrokes. That paint also find a new grid of real pixels on the low-thread count jute fabric, where both the digital and physical resolution (often different) can both be sensed.Jennifer J. Lee, Tennis, 2024Jennifer J. Lee, Tennis, 2024 (detail)The newest work in the exhibition Beach, 2024 measures only 12 by 21 inches and feels like a JPEG image had trouble representing the individual grains of sand producing slight color glitches. Lees translation of that exact effect is now overlaid onto a new crisp grid of thread. Even the open spaces between the threads (that appear like tiny black dots) mimic grains of sand.Jennifer J. Lee, Beach, 2024Jennifer J. Lee, Beach, 2024 (detail)Lees work also dances between the real fabric and the represented material of the chosen subject. Security Mirror, for example, is a battle (or perfect balance?) between the prickly fibers of the jute and the slick image of a perfectly smooth mirror. While in Stripes, the eye oscillates between the real thread count of burlap and the fabric of the image. Everything here is a brilliant and highly-considered choice in both subject, scale and its resulting conversation with the material and technique.Jennifer J. Lee, Security Mirror, 2024Jennifer J. Lee, Security Mirror, 2024 (detail)Jennifer J. Lee, Stripes, 2024Jennifer J. Lee, Stripes, 2024 (detail)The centerpiece of the exhibition is a single wall holding 4 paintings of blue jeans. Lee Jeans is a sly wink at the artists own name on the label, while Acid Jeans painstakingly renders the random patterns of an acid wash with perfection. Look closer to note that the pants dont seem to be worn by a person. Several images tease the view of a mannequin or display form above the waistline while they hang slightly stranger than they would on a real body.Jennifer J. Lee: The Falls. Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, 2025Jennifer J. Lee, Lee Jeans, 2024Jennifer J. Lee, Lee Jeans, 2024 (detail)Jennifer J. Lee, Acid Jeans, 2024Jennifer J. Lee, Acid Jeans, 2024 (detail)Lees work continues to question, reveal, and challenge the speed and experience of images we consume on a daily basis. Her paintings are both fully familiar and totally strange inviting us to slow down, rethink the possible, and have a very real and profound experience with a digital image made real through an unrelenting and unbelievable dedication.Jennifer J. Lee: The Falls. Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, 2025Jennifer J. Lees The Falls is on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York through February 22nd, 2025. And if youre in Los Angeles, you can check out several of Lees paintings that are currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in the group exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968.WHAT: Jennifer J. Lee The FallsWHERE: Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, 87 Franklin St, New York City, New YorkWHEN: January 10 February 22, 2025All full artwork and installation images courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York.Detail images by author, David Behringer.

Canceling memberships has become an everyday thing for a lot of people. We cycle through streaming services, we sign up for trial memberships, we find cheaper, better options for everything from television to gyms and jump whenever it makes financial, emotional, or psychological sense for us to do so. Were pretty much at a point where the moment you sign up for a service or subscription, the countdown to your inevitable cancellation begins.And everyone knows that canceling those subscriptions and services can be a challenge, even with new rules in place that are supposed to make it easier. If youve ever tried to cancel something and found it very difficult, or even outright failed to get it done, you were probably a victim of dark patterns and psychological tricks that companies use to stymie your efforts to dump them. In other words, you got sucked into their cancellation funnel.How "cancellation funnels" workWhen you tell a customer service rep (CSR) that you want to cancel (or you click cancel on a site), you trigger a retention script thats sometimes called a "cancellation funnel" or a "churn funnel." Companies want to hang onto your revenue, so they dedicate time and resources to changing your mind, and that often involves subtle tricks they employ to change the conversation and make cancellation difficult enough to deter people who arent thoroughly committed to it.Its important to understand that the difficulty is itself a psychological trick: Obstruction. Companies know that many people make these calls when they have limited time or energy, like during their lunch hour at work or at night when theyre tired. Making the cancellation process long and grueling means more people will simply give up halfway through.But thats not the only trick companies use to stop you from canceling their services. Heres a rundown of some of the most common tricks youll encounter.Common tricks companies use to keep you subscribedHalf the cancellation battle is being able to recognize the tricks being used against you:The Ask. When you tell a CSR that youre canceling a service, one of their first moves is to ask you for your reasons. That might not seem too tricky, but no matter what your answer is, the CSR has a section of their retention script designed to invalidate it. If you say the service is too expensive, they might offer you a free month, or a short-term discount. Boom! Its now not so expensive anymore, so why are you canceling?If your goal was just to reduce costs or wring some other perk out of the company, maybe thats fine! The trick, though, is that the fix is temporary, and they hope that by the time the higher rates kick back in you will have forgotten about canceling, and they can get a few more months of sweet fees out of you before you notice. The best way to handle this is to refuse to give them information to work withjust say Because I want to or No reason and wait. It short-circuits the retention script if you dont give them anything to work with.FOMO. The fear of missing out can be a powerful motivator, so a lot of retention scripts leverage it by warning you about what youre throwing away. They usually use words like benefits to underscore all the goodness you have in your life right now as a result of their service. Even if youre not really sure what those benefits are and you never used them, the idea of losing something sparks anxiety and makes you rethink your decision.Cooling-off periods. Companies will often seek to delay the actual cancellation of your account to give you time to cool off. This can be done with an offer of a free month, or suggesting a temporary pause in your subscription instead of an outright cancellation. This might seem like a victory, but its just designed to give you time to forget the reasons you wanted to cancel in the first place without actually addressing those reasons.Confusing language. Dark patterns come in many forms. One of the most subtle is vocabularythis is why a lot of companies (like Amazon) use words like continue and cancel close together and in confusing ways. You might think that continue means continue to pay for this service, but clicking it often actually means continue cancellation process, and cancel actually means stop the cancellation process.Similarly, many sites will use words like benefits instead of membership or account, because it implies something really good that youre throwing away instead of a simple cost-benefit decision.Guilt Copy. Also known as confirmshaming, this is when a company uses language designed to make you feel guilty about canceling. An example would be a choice between Keep my benefits and No thanks, I hate having benefits. It seems playful, but its meant to make you feel like a dope for going through with the cancellation.Comparison prevention. If youve ever experienced a CSR presenting you with a complex list of options that will supposedly solve your problem without canceling, youve experienced "comparison prevention." This is when the company deliberately makes it difficult to figure out the true value of an offer with a lot of unnecessary complexity. This can be done by bundling features and costs in different ways across different packages or subscription levels, making it difficult to perform a one-to-one comparison, and by forcing you to click through to separate web pages to see details, or by simply hiding details in documentation you probably wont read.

xAI has launched its Grok 3 models during a livestream with Elon Musk, who said they were "an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2." The Grok 3 mini model can answer questions quickly, but it's not as accurate as the other models in the family. Meanwhile, the Grok 3 Reasoning and Grok 3 mini Reasoning models are capable of mimicking human-like reasoning when it comes to analyzing information the user needs.Other examples of AI models capable of reasoning tasks are DeepSeek's R1 and OpenAI's o3-mini. According to TechCrunch, xAI claimed during the event that Grok 3 Reasoning performed better than the best version of o3-mini on several benchmarks. Grok 3's features will initially be available to subscribers paying for X's Premium+ tier, which now costs $40 a month in the US. (X raised the Premium+ tier's pricing from $16 to $22 in December now, less than two months later, it's almost twice as expensive.) They will also be available through an upcoming separate subscription option for the standalone Grok app and Grok on the web. Based on leaked information, the subscription option will be called SuperGrok and will cost $30 a month.With the Grok 3 models enabled, users will be able to ask the chatbot to "Think" if they want to tap its reasoning capabilities for mathematics, science and programming questions. For even more complex queries, they can use the "Big Brain" function that requires additional computing. The models' reasoning capabilities power a new Grok feature called DeepSearch, which xAI describes as the "next generation search engine." DeepSearch will scan the internet and X, formerly Twitter, to conjure a brief summary for research inquiries.In addition to launching the Grok 3 models, xAI also revealed during the event that the Grok app will get a "voice mode" within a week, giving it synthesized voices to converse with users. Grok 2, the company's older models, will be open sourced in the coming months.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/xai-launches-grok-3-ai-claiming-it-is-capable-of-human-reasoning-140007172.html?src=rss

Weve long been fans of ThermoWorks instant-read thermometers for grilling and all kinds of cooking, and now you can get our favorite for one of the best prices weve seen. Engadget readers can pick up the Thermapen One for only $79 right now thanks to an exclusive deal that knocks $30 off the normal price. The Thermopen One is calibrated to record temperatures accurately, with an error margin of 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.3 degrees Celsius). It also does this within a second. To help users check the temperature conveniently, the display rotates 360 degrees and has a smart backlight display that brightens when its covered or in a low-light environment. The company claims that a single AAA battery in the thermometer will last for 2,000 hours, and its partly due to how it automatically turns on or off when you pick it up or put it down. An IP67 rating makes it safe to use in wet and dusty locations for a while. (You should still try to keep it clean and dry, though.) If thats not reassuring enough, each Thermapen One comes with a five-year warranty. Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/grab-the-thermoworks-thermapen-one-while-its-on-sale-for-79-100052639.html?src=rss

Apple is putting a fresh spin on the Apple TV logo. Well, actually, there are 30 fresh spins, one for each team in Major League Soccer ahead of the 30th season kicking off.

The huge data center project will create 10,000 jobs.

Jefferson Early Learning Center bears little resemblance to elementary schools many adults recall attending in their earliest years. The classrooms have child-size boats and construction vehicles children can play on, and ceilings painted to resemble outer space. There are no desksall space is devoted to learning through play. Windows are low to the ground so children can easily look outside. The gym floor is made of pre-K friendly layered vinyl, rather than hardwood, to cushion inevitable trips and falls. Hallways are lined with a corrugated plastic for wiggly fingers to touch as children transition to other locations.Children love coming to the building, said teacher Cathy Delamore. They feel like they own it.Alief Independent School District, which serves about 40,000 children in west Houston, is one of a growing number of districts across the country to pump money into creating a building that is tailor-made for pre-kindergarteners. Its new facility cost about $21 million and enrolls nearly 400 4- and 5-year-olds. By making the investment, school leaders are trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of placing young children in buildings designed for older students, including lost learning time when tiny feet have to meander down long hallways to bathrooms and cafeterias. Research suggests that when designed well, buildings can contribute to better outcomes for children. Creators of the Reggio Emilia approach to early learning, an educational philosophy that emphasizes child-led learning, even refer to the environment as the third teacher in a classroom.A construction themed classroom at Jefferson Early Learning Center. The program emphasizes play and is built around the needs of 4-year-olds. [Photo: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report]Benefits of personalized pre-K Over the past few years, educators have grown aware of the benefits of a personalized pre-K environment, said Melissa Turnbaugh, a senior principal at the architecture firm PBK, which has designed more than 240 elementary schools nationwide, including Jefferson and several others in Texas. Theres an openness and willingness to rethink these sites, Turnbaugh said.Similar pre-K renovations and investments have been made in both high- and low-income Texas districts, including the nearby Houston Independent School District, Willis Independent School District north of Houston, the Mansfield Independent School District south of Fort Worth, the Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District in the Rio Grande Valley, and Leander Independent School District, just northwest of Austin.Nationally, districts of all sizes have embraced the trend over the past few years, including the Troy School District in Michigan and New York City Public Schools. In some cases, building a specialized facility helps a district with limited resources get the biggest bang for their buck, while meeting enrollment needs, said Turnbaugh. Some states and cities are also dedicating money to the efforts, including Illinois, Detroit and San Mateo, California.Two students play in a veterinary-themed classroom at Jefferson Early Learning Center. Each classroom is designed with a specific theme to encourage deeper play. [Photo: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report]The importance of play That embrace is in part because of a growing recognition nationwide of the importance of play for young children, as well as reports that play time has been increasingly squeezed out of the early grades. States are also seeing record high enrollment in state-funded preschool programs. During the 202223 school year, investment in state-funded preschool reached an all-time high. Spending on the programs increased in 29 states, buoyed in part by COVID relief funds. Between 2022 and 2023, for example, Texas saw more than 21,000 additional 3- and 4-year-olds enroll. The state also slightly increased pre-K funding and, beginning in 2019, started requiring districts to offer full-day pre-K programs. The full-day programs have been rolling out in districts since 2020.Scores of districts are adding this new grade of 4-year-olds, said Shelly Masur, vice president of advisory and state policy for the Low Income Investment Fund, which runs an initiative focused on creating and improving high-quality facilities for early learning programs. They have to figure out where those kids are going to go.A facility built for their needs, like Jefferson, is exactly where young children should go, some experts say. The children seem to agree.On a sunny fall morning, joyful screams could be heard as children chased each other up and down gentle hills on a large playground with natural-looking features meant to replicate the highlands and lowlands of Texas. Pre-K students in elementary schools dont always have age-appropriate playgrounds, and structures are often designed for children who are older. But Jefferson has multiple large playgrounds and play courtyards, all designed for pre-kindergarteners, featuring natural structures and textures, like logs and grass.In Alief, where more than 83% of children qualify as economically disadvantaged, more than 20 percentage points higher than the state average, residents voted in 2015 to approve a property tax increase to help pay for full-day pre-K programs in the district. After touring the Mansfield Independent School Districts early learning facility, Aliefs district leaders decided they wanted to invest in an early learning building with immersive, themed classrooms, instead of simply adding on or repurposing classrooms in elementary schools around the district. Jefferson opened in 2022 as one of two new early learning facilities in the district. About six miles away, the second, Maria Del Carmen Martinez Early Learning Center, which has a similar design, serves around 400 students.A growing body of research shows that not all pre-K classrooms, or the facilities theyre housed in, are appropriate for young kids. Early learning settings in particular should have a warm, homelike environment with ample natural light, research shows. There should be spacious classrooms that allow children to move their bodies and play in a variety of spaces around the room. Facilities should have playgrounds that are appropriate for the littlest learners, and provide ample opportunities to experience and explore nature.Related: How play is making a comeback in kindergartenThere are also practical details to keep in mind for preschoolers, like having bathrooms adjacent to classrooms, child-size furniture, tiny toilets, and sinks low to the ground so children can practice routines like handwashing independently. When we make things more accessible to them, they start to learn the independence that we need them to develop over time, said Masur. This type of setting isnt always present in elementary schools, which are built to accommodate a much wider age range of children and are typically designed for instruction rather than play.[Photo: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report]How the space impacts behaviorFacilities can have a surprisingly large impact on the experiences of teachers and young children. A study of a preschool program in West Hartford, Connecticut, for example, found the amount of childrens time spent interacting with an adult caregiver increased from 3% to 22% after the program moved from a crowded basement room to a larger classroom with bathrooms, sinks, storage space, and phones inside the classroom. Although all other factors remained the same, the teachers reported their students had fewer tantrums, something they attributed to having a larger, brighter, and more organized space.A facility can even affect how satisfied early educators are with their jobs. Delamore, the Jefferson teacher, who has worked in the district for 18 years, said the bright, spacious rooms and hallways help keep her from feeling confined during the day. While aimed at 4-year-olds, the buildings calming atmosphere helps her enjoy being at work, she said.Certain aspects make more sense for children at this age, she added, like the spiral shape of the building, which makes it easier to keep students together as they transition. Students eat family-style meals around circular tables, creating a sense of community, Delamore said, a contrast to the long, rectangular tables often seen in elementary school cafeterias.Buildings that are not designed to meet childrens needs, or that are cramped and outdated, can impede development and learning, experts say.One of the most recent examples of this comes from a 2016 study of Tennessees public preschool classrooms, which are mostly housed in existing elementary schools. That study, conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University, found 25% of each school day was lost transitioning children to another activity, including walking to bathrooms and lining up to go to lunch.Related: The complex world of pre-K playWhen designing Jefferson, Turnbaugh and her team tried to think of the campus through the eyes of a 4-year-old. Delamore, at Jefferson, said the intricately designed classrooms motivate students to go deeper in their play. On a recent morning in the veterinary classroom, a dozen 4- and 5-year-olds busied themselves around the room, immersed in play or small group work with a teacher. Children drew pictures of animals, read books, and played animal-themed card games beneath large, colorful pictures of dogs and cats painted on the walls.On one side of the room, 4-year-old Jaycyon had donned a white lab coat and was inspecting a fluffy gray and white toy cat lying on the counter in front of him. The cat was hurt, Jaycyon announced, likely from a sharp corner of the cage he was kept in.I have to give him a shot, he said bravely. Jaycyon dipped a clear, plastic syringe into an orange medication bottle and confidently injected invisible medication into the cat.At the end of three weeks, Jaycyon and his classmates will transition to a new classroom, such as Tinker Town, where they will learn about construction, or Space City, an homage to the nearby NASA space center.On a daily basis, students have access to one of several outdoor spaces called a back porch, where families can also come and eat lunch together. These spaces also act as surrogate backyards for students, many of whom dont have yards at home or access to parks. Students also have access to a sensory room with toys and soft mats, where they can take a break when they are overstimulated and practice skills to calm down.Jefferson sits on nearly 20 acres of land, accessible via trails for students to explore with their teachers. (Alief returned the surrounding land back to its natural prairie state to help with climate-change related flooding.)The educators at Alief say the districts investment in a facility that encourages play-based learning has paid off. What I see as a major difference is the childrens self-regulation, but also their confidence, said the schools principal, Kim Hammer, now in her 16th year leading an early childhood center. A traditional pre-K setting is more teacher led and teacher directed, she said. Here its more teacher facilitated, so you see more of the children taking more initiative, she added. Children have autonomy, and children have much more choice.There is evidence that the new facility may be helping children progress. During the 2023-24 school year, 49% of students came in meeting vocabulary benchmarks. By the end of the year, 73% were at that level, Hammer said, a higher rate than previous years when the districts pre-K programs were in traditional elementary schools. School officials say the themed classrooms help enhance childrens language skills, as children learn the vocabulary specific to that room. Attendance rates are high and holding steady, something that is uncommon in pre-K.Despite the success and benefits of programs like Jeffersons, educators agree there are challenges. A pre-K only facility adds an extra transition for students who, in traditional programs, might otherwise attend pre-K at their home elementary school.Without more funding, revamped pre-K facilities are unlikely to spread fast. Many districts lack the money, partly because state and federal funding for pre-K is often less than for other grades. In Texas, for example, although the state now requires districts to offer full day pre-K, it only provides funding for half a day of pre-K. Alief has to cover the rest from local funds.Although sustaining the building will be financially challenging in the long run, educators are determined to find a way to make it work for the benefit of the kids.Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at (212) 678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.This story about early learning centers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, with support from the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School. Sign up for the Early Childhood newsletter.