Integrating physical activity data technologies into elementary school classrooms

Abstract

Mindfulness is a critical dimension in current school physical activity programs (e.g., physical education, intramural, and interscholastic physical activities). School physical activity programs are a key vehicle used in developing healthy active lifestyles among children and youth; however, the absence of mindfulness in these programs has given rise to numerous problems (such as body-mind dualism and stress) that interfere with attaining program objectives. This paper discusses what mindfulness is, why it is needed, and how mindfulness can be integrated into school physical activity programming. The integration of mindfulness can help develop a healthy lifestyle for a whole child; in turn, our school physical activity programs can be re-conceptualized and transformed to deliver this objective on a perpetual basis.

Opportunistic uses of the traditional school day through student examination of Fitbit activity tracker data

“…We have seen evidence of significantly greater gains in certain elementary statistical topics over traditional instruction [20] and students building on prior recollection of their subjective experience of activities to develop new and more appropriate visual analysis strategies [19].…”

Developing educational materials about risks on social network sites: a design based research approach

“…Reeves (2006) states that a design-based approach involves four sequential steps: (1) analysis of practical problems, (2) development of solutions based on existing knowledge, (3) evaluation research of the solutions in practice, and (4) reflection on the produced design principles (see Figure 1). Previous literature reporting design-based research studies often only reports on one of these steps (e.g., Hakkarainen, 2007;Land & Zimmerman, 2015;Lee & Thomas, 2011). In this study, the entire design-based research approach has been used to develop effective educational materials to teach children in secondary education (aged 12 to 19 years) how to act safely on SNSs and to describe critical design principles for the development of these …”

BodyVis

“…Despite its long history, as Lee and Thomas note [24], there has been surprisingly little consideration of physiological and on-body sensors applied to learning contexts. The work that does exist (e.g., [22,23,24]) explores off-the-shelf tracker tools rather than custom innovations (as we do here).…”

“…The wearer's physiological phenomena are visualized on externalized fabric anatomy, allowing the wearer and viewers to gain a unique view of the internal body. While past research has investigated wearables [22,23,24] and augmented reality [2,4,26] for body learning, BodyVis is the first exploration of a physical/digital manifestation that actively responds to the physiology of the wearer.…”