Anthropometric Consideration for Designing Classroom Furniture in Arabic Primary and Preparatory Boys Schools

Background: In today's educational environment a student is required to do class work with the school furniture (benches and desks) for at least four to six hours per day. However, anthropometric dimensions of the body of the students were not considered during designing of this school furniture. Therefore the school furniture becomes ill fitted for the children. It is a known fact that body dimensions of the children varies from age and region. Consequently, the dimensions of furniture should also be different in different cases. Objective: The objective of this study was to determine reliable and accurate structural anthropometrical measurements for male students to use in the product design process. Methods: The present investigation was carried out on 90 Egyptian schoolboys having the age range of 6-15 years. Different anthropometric data were collected from these boys. Results and Conclusion: The results revealed that all the anthropometric dimensions of the schoolchildren increase with their age. Regarding the primary schoolboys, there was a large difference between mean values of different anthropometric dimensions between the boys of grade I and grade II (4.94% to 42.94%), between grade III and grade IV (0.57% to 16.10%) and between grade V and grade VI (0.30% to 20.58%). Similarly, for the preparatory schoolboys, there was a large difference between mean values of different anthropometric dimensions between the boys of grade VII and grade VIII (0.02% to 30.64%) and between grade VIII and grade IX (0.43% to 22.18%). Therefore, the design of furniture for the children of grade I will not match the anthropometric dimensions of the children of grade VI. Similarly, the design of furniture for the children of grade VII will not match the anthropometric dimensions of the children of grade IX. This Study also computed the percentile values (5 th , 50 th and 95 th ) of anthropometric measures, which will be helpful for designing of the classroom furniture and layout of furniture in the classroom from grade I to Grade IX.