You may have noticed an increase in exercise computer games of late, particularly with the launch of the Wii Fit. It's part of a trend in games consoles to have more physically interactive interfaces such as dance mats, eye toys or even guitars. Derek Robertson has been looking into educational benefits of such interfaces.
Alastair Thin who works in life sciences at my uni has been researching the fitness benefits of different sorts of exercise games. I'm really interested in this work because he is getting hard physiological evidence relating to fitness, which will help to cut through the marketing hype. He's currently touring the States, cruising around conferences. Here's a link to his slides: http://www.gamersizescience.org/2008/05/go-for-the-burn-games-for-health-2008-presentation/.
I am obviously doing something wrong here - why am I staying at home marking exams and organising conferences when I could be fighting off hordes of fans and reporters at conferences? :-)
Judy, do you mean 'hard physiological evidence' that is positive relating to fitness and the use of 'exergames'? I've had a quick look at Alastair's slides but am not sure what the results are. Would you mind breaking it down a little please for those of us who are mathematically/scientifically challenged?
Posted by: Judy Martin | May 16, 2008 at 12:02 AM
I've read some of the older posts on the same link to Alastair's slides. This one explains the study conducted and summarises the results pretty well. I get it now!
http://www.gamersizescience.org/2008/05/wii-fit-and-an-academic-researchers-quest/
Posted by: Judy Martin | May 16, 2008 at 12:16 AM
Yes, much better to read Alasdair's explanation than have me attempt to explain it. These are initial results, and we're hoping to have some student project exploring them further next term. I am interested to see how motivation interacts with fitness over time - basically if kids were using it in school as a "gym" activity, would they still remain motivated by the game?
Posted by: JudyRobertson | May 16, 2008 at 08:57 AM
Kim P. at Belmore South Public school has been using Wii games with her class for Physical Education (P.E.) lessons for a while now. She had an interesting post about that on her blog at
http://kpericles.edublogs.org/2007/03/19/pe-no-its-pwii/.
Posted by: Judy Martin | May 16, 2008 at 11:55 PM