An Exploration into How Physical Activity Data-Recording Devices Could be Used in Computer-Supported Data Investigations

Abstract

There is a great potential opportunity to use portable physical activity monitoring devices as data collection tools for educational purposes. Using one such device, we designed and implemented a weeklong workshop with high school students to test the utility of such technology. During that intervention, students performed data investigations of physical activity that culminated in the design and implementation of their own studies. In this paper, we explore some of the mathematical thinking that took place through a series of vignettes of a pair of students engaged in analyzing some of their own activity data. A personal connection to the data appeared to aid these students in recognizing their own errors, and ultimately helped them move from a point-based analytical approach for making sense of the data to an aggregate one. From our observations of this designed learning experience, we conclude that physical activity data recording devices can afford students the opportunity to reason with personally relevant data in meaningful ways.

Integrating physical activity data technologies into elementary school classrooms

“…This guidance was necessary for a variety of reasons. First, earlier work with this technology suggested that investigations with an uncertain outcome might promote more substantive discussions of data (Lee and DuMont 2010). Our concern for this study was that investigations which had easily predicted outcomes would lead to disengagement or lead to students misreading their data to conform with their anticipated conclusions (e.g., Kuhn 1989).…”

“…Because they involve use during and for physical activities, we refer to these as PAD technologies (Lee and DuMont 2010). Canonical examples include pedometers, heart rate monitors, accelerometers, and distance trackers.…”

“…We illustrated this in an earlier design iteration (Lee and DuMont 2010), where we worked with a pilot group of high school students to capture the PAD related to a variety of games and activities, such as playing the basketball game H.O.R.S.E., running on treadmills, and playing a game of Frisbee. Our results from that intervention were very encouraging, capturing video cases of students reflecting on the data collected from their activities and posing substantive questions about how best to characterize central tendency and distribution of the data they had collected.…”

“…However, that assumption was based on positive prior experiences in a very different learning context (Lee and DuMont 2010) and required additional design iterations for verification. The current effort involves our second design iteration-we began to scale the technology in such a manner that it could be used with intact classrooms of students after analyzing how much smaller groups of students engaged with similar technologies.…”

“…These work best when the sensor straps are being placed directly on the skin and below the sternum, and the sensors require a small amount of water between the skin and the sensor in order for the electrical signal to be detected. There are a number of models with a variety of features, some of which are reported in Lee and DuMont (2010). For this work, we opted to use the Garmin ForeRunner 305 which has a sport watch that communicates wirelessly with the chest strap heart rate monitor in which live heart rate information is displayed and recorded on a wristwatch and is then transferred to a computer.…”