Making it Playful to Exercise in Schoolyards and Classrooms
This project is designed to explore and showcase how public schools can create playful environments in schoolyards or classrooms using digital fabrication to engage their pupils in physical playful activities – Thus meeting the new school reform’s requirement of 45 minutes of physical activity during schooldays. The project’s case outlines a design concept for intermediate stage and secondary school pupils that combine play and movement with several digital fabrication technologies.
About the demo
The project’s participants are pupils and teachers in 6th and 8th grade at three Danish public schools located in Kolding, Haderslev and Ørum. The overall topic of the project is to make pupils participate actively in a physically demanding playful activity and engage them by inviting them to compose and implement their own ideas. The expected project outcome is to make the pupils engaged in and self-motivated for physical activities and, thus, make the 45 requested minutes of movement something they enjoy rather than dread. The presented case will in this way showcase for other schools and teachers how they can use digital media and Makey-Makey technologies to make children engaged in moving. The general design concept of the showcase co-designed with pupils is to let digital media and digital fabrication come together in gameful or playful situations that pupils can engage in “by embedding sensor and actuator combinations in intelligent play objects”.
- In the project approximately 90 students have participated together with us (four teachers at three different schools). During the first period of the project the four teachers have spend approximately 50 hours of observation and analyzing the current state of exercise in schoolyards and classrooms. Subsequently, there have been organized a Makey-Makey workshop of three hours of duration where pupils and teachers worked and co-designed together. For remaining part of the project we will work closely together with the same group of pupils for approximately another 50 hours to develop our showcase through a participatory design approach.
- The central topic of our project is to remix computergames with movement by using new digital fabrication technologies such as Makey- Makey with the aim of making pupils self- motivated to be physically active for 45 minutes a day in accordance with the new Danish school reform.
- By the end of the project in late May we expect to have developed a low-fi prototype based on the participatory workshops. We will work together with pupils to explore the possibilities of Makey-Makey for movement and develop a prototype from the basic principles of that technology.
The project will be presented in the form of a poster showing the participatory design process and a video that visualizes the design concept. There will also be a low-fi prototype to show the interaction.
Presented by:
Lis Winni Skousen – Aarhus University, Teacher at Sdr. Vang Skole
Bente Staub – Aarhus University, Teacher at Sct. Severin Skole
Ove Holm – Aarhus University, Teacher at Sct. Severin Skole
Stian Rasmussen – Aarhus University, Teacher at Ørum Skole
Rikke Toft Nørgård – Center for Teaching Development and Digital Media, Aarhus University