Go to school and just dance
Published: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 2:31 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 2:31 p.m.
When the staff at Conlee Elementary School in Las Cruces, N.M., began having students do five minutes of Just Dance, an active video game for Nintendo’s Wii, at the start of every school day last year, they noticed a trend: Tardiness went down.
When the activity started up again this year, the students cheered and clapped, says physical education teacher Celsa Madrid.
“The kids get a kick out of their teachers working out with them,” she says. “We are having a great time.”
The dance activity is broadcast into classrooms that have TV monitors. Madrid was inspired to try this idea by researchers at New Mexico State University who are investigating the use of active video games as part of an obesity-prevention project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The researchers have offered children and adults the opportunity to play active games at a laundromat in Hawaii, an after-school program in Connecticut and a low-income community program in Delaware.
Next up: the use of the games in PE and other classes. The researchers are testing whether doing an active video game before math and spelling tests improves performance.
“The power of exergames is they are fun and interesting and immerse the player in the activity so kids don’t even realize they are exercising,” says Barbara Chamberlin, director of the Learning Games Lab (exergamesunlocked.org) at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
She discussed her research over the weekend at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society in San Diego.
Stepping up physical activity is one of the pillars of first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to reduce childhood obesity. About a third of children and adolescents - 25 million kids - are obese or overweight, which puts them at a greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other health problems.
Kids are supposed to do an hour or more of moderate-intensity to vigorous aerobic physical activity each day, government guidelines say. But not all children meet that goal for many reasons, including not getting enough time in PE classes or at recess, living in neighborhoods where it’s not safe to play outside and spending too much time being sedentary in front of the computer, TV and video games.
Better than sitting
Some people believe active gaming can help turn the tide, and researchers are investigating how much kids get out of these kinds of activities.
Bryan Haddock, an associate professor of kinesiology at California State University in San Bernardino, and colleagues tested how many calories middle-school students used when they played the Wii Sports activities.
On average, the kids burned the fewest calories playing the golf activity (1.6 calories a minute) and the most when doing the boxing activity (4.3 calories a minute).
Playing the golf game “was not a whole lot better than just sitting, but the boxing activity would be the equivalent of the kids taking a brisk walk or a slow jog,” Haddock says. “It’s a moderate, not vigorous, activity.”
He also found that college students use an average of 5.5 to 7.5 calories a minute doing games such as Your Shape, EA Sports Active, Just Dance and Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout.
People get out of these games what they put into them, he says. “For one kid, it’s a great workout, and for another kid, it’s not. It depends on whether it’s something they really enjoy.”
The games are a supplement to other activities and sports and not a replacement for getting outside to play soccer or tag, he says.
“What I’ve been telling people is that they are certainly a whole lot better than sitting on the couch playing the handheld video games where you do nothing, but I think it’s a stretch to think that buying one of these games will replace the need to do other physical activities.”
Other experts have found health advantages to these games. West Virginia University researchers had overweight and obese kids ages 7 to 12 do Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) at home for at least 30 minutes a day, five days a week for 12 weeks.
Findings: The dancing provided a moderate to vigorous workout, halted weight gain in the children and improved their fitness, blood pressure and arterial function, an important factor in fending off heart disease and type 2 diabetes, says lead researcher Emily Murphy, the state obesity-prevention specialist for the West Virginia University extension service (wvgamesforhealth.wvu.edu).
Now DDR is available in the state’s high schools and middle schools and about half of the elementary schools, and teachers are using the activity in PE classes, before and after school and in classrooms as an activity break and at some school dances, she says. “Kids who used to go to the dances and sit along the wall will get up and dance to DDR.”
Murphy is now studying whether active gaming boosts children’s self-confidence, and whether that improvement in self-confidence translates into being more willing to try other physical activities and sports, such as going out for a soccer team.
Moving and learning
National physical education experts say integrating active gaming into schools has merit.
Broadcasting the dance program at the start of a school day “sounds like a wonderful idea because it gets every kid moving,” says James Sallis, director of the Active Living Research Program at San Diego State University.
There are several advantages to these games, he says. “Students can do the moves in a limited amount of space. You don’t have to train teachers. You can push the button, and the kids get more activity.”
He also applauds the possibility of using the games before tests. Research shows that physical activity improves concentration and attention, he says. “It gets kids’ brains kicked into high gear so they are ready for test-taking.” Those are also among the reasons that recess and PE classes are so important, he says.
But Sallis isn’t convinced that these activities should be included in PE classes. “Whenever possible, we want to get the kids outdoors, where they can run around more freely. We actually need to teach kids activities such as basketball, baseball, soccer, volleyball. We need to teach them teamwork.”
These are the kinds of skills kids need for a lifetime of physical activity, he says. “Doing some kind of exergame may be better than no PE or bad PE, but I don’t think it’s as good as good PE.”
Charlene Burgeson, executive director of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, a group of physical education professionals, says, “We need to meet kids where they are, and if active video games get them moving, then all the better.”
That said, “when the games are used in PE, they need to relate to the skills and knowledge that’s being taught. It needs to be added value to the instruction,” she says. “Physical education is not just about being active, it’s about being active for the purpose of learning.”
Other ways to move
Chamberlin says it’s important for schools to have strong PE programs, and she sees the games as another tool.
“This is not about replacing traditional PE. We are not talking about taking kids off the basketball court and having them play bowling on Wii Sports - we’re talking about taking passive time and making it active,” she says.
Kids need to learn how to play actively, whether they are with their friends in an open field or by themselves in the living room, she says.
The consoles and games may be too costly for some schools, but the lessons learned from this research can be incorporated in other less-expensive ways, Chamberlin says. Teachers can do all kinds of short activities, from speed-walking breaks to dance breaks using their own music.
Students can do these kinds of activities in five minutes, and they don’t need to change their shoes or clothes, she says. “We have to give kids lots of different activity options so they figure out, ‘Oh, that’s the way I like to move.’
“People in our country need as many ways as possible to be active.”
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