Physical Fitness

Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Physical Fitness

How Interactive Play Can Improve Academic Performance

As the pressure to perform academically rises with each passing school year, students are seeing less time in their days for movement and physical activity. Teacher accountability for student test scores is at an all-time high — making it difficult to allow the creative play time researchers insist is important to developing minds. Finding creative ways to allow kids some physical freedom but keep them on academic tasks is something most teachers really try to do — but it comes with challenges.

One innovative concept that I recently learned more about is from MotionMagix™, a company that has developed an Interactive Wall, Interactive Floor and other engaging interactive teaching methods. The company offers many interactive options that implement gesture technology for floors and walls. The available items include games, quizzes, themes and alternative teaching tools that range in usefulness for preK, elementary and special needs students.

By projecting the learning material onto walls and floors, the company provides a hygienic, safe and reliable way to keep kids in all age groups engaged for hours of fun and learning. By using gesture technology, kids are able to be physical AND learn at the same time.

Gesture based interactive technology in a classroom is optimally used when educators pair academic subjects with  physical activity. There is a proven track record of success in deepening learner engagement. For example, Math Tentacle, a MotionMagix™ Interactive Floor game , gives kids the chance to learn Math in a very entertaining way. The audio visual game helps the kids learn numbers and counting in a really unique and engaging manner. The game also boosts motor activity and movement as it involves jumping and selecting the desired digits.

Schools that have already installed MotionMagix™ have found that statistically, student engagement and interaction has risen. Jumpstart, a preschool based in Pune, India, has observed 6 times higher engagement from kids using the interactive tools. The teachers say the games provide a healthy way of blending mental and physical activity, while improving collaboration, participation and cognitive skills in children.

The way teachers approach limited physical activities, like recess and PE classes, is important to keeping kids interested in learning while addressing the childhood obesity issue. Technology has made life more sedentary, but it has also provided for some innovative ways to get up and move. Ed-tech companies that combine academic pursuits with the movement that kids inherently love are in demand — both in the eyes of teachers and of the students they teach.

If you are an educator, how do you keep your kids focused on academics while enjoying some movement freedom?

Check out MotionMagix™ in action in this video:

 

 

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Physical Fitness, Policy & Reform

Health Education Provides Mixed Messages

Is it possible that America’s schools are responsible for most of the country’s health problems?

Yes, these institutions of education–from the K-12 staples to universities, colleges, and trade schools–are preoccupied with messages of health, knowledge and success. But as every parent can attest, children are particularly attuned to the gap between word and deed.

In schools, millions of kids are peppered with advice about eating fruits and veggies, getting enough sleep, and avoiding the ubiquitous junk food. Then they are shuffled through cash-strapped cafeterias relying on deep fryers and sugary, fattening condiments to make frozen convenience foods palatable; athletic programs conspire with snack food retailers, gaining equipment in exchange for brand messaging and vending machines in the hallways. The nutritional guidelines individuals and institutions are supposed to follow end up being just that: guidelines, loose to the point of irrelevance.

The nutritional contradiction plaguing the nation’s schools is well known. But the mixed messages go further than diet, and set a destructive pattern that plays out over a lifetime.

School is Practice for an Unhealthy Life

Schools are the first place many children learn to sacrifice sleep. It is a conventional source of bragging rights, shared among the athletic and the poindextrous alike. Hours of rest and recovery, sacrificed in the name of study and scholarship or rehearsal and training, are exchanged as though they constitute accomplishment in and of themselves. And as common as the willfully sleepless trend is among students of all ages, it is also a quintessential element in the story of the starving artist, tortured genius, or serial entrepreneur. Again, experts can warn against the dangers of sleeplessness or critique the claims, but the cultural norm and social pressure is to treat sleep as expendable.

Never mind that fitness is the key to performance in academic endeavors as well as athletics; deprivation of sleep and a diet hinged on cost and convenience make for a more compelling personal narrative. America is obsessed with underdogs, and so has crafted a culture where we all set ourselves up for failure by neglecting the pillars of our personal health.

Poor diet and sleep habits, of course, correlate with one another: weight loss without proper sleep is nearly impossible, and poor diet can contribute to insomnia. This is well known. Also broadly understood is that the triad of diet, sleep, and exercise is implicated in virtually all of the leading causes of death and chronic illness in the United States.

Poor Young Bodies, Poor Young Minds

It is not a particularly long or winding road, therefore, from the habits of study, socialization, and personal neglect students learn to adopt in school, and the leading public health crises in the world today. And although our culture has done its level best to segregate mental health from physical wellness, the connection is clear: when our bodies fall into disrepair, our minds are likely close behind, if not leading the decline.

Schools are a training ground for lifestyle: extracurriculars go a long way in identity formation, and habits developed early on only become harder to change later. The neuroplasticity of young children in the K-12 years means it is the most critical time of all in terms of setting precedents of health. It is one thing for career-minded adults to sacrifice health and happiness in pursuit of security or advancement, but ingraining those choices as a matter of status and routine in school dooms children to duplicate that pattern in their own adult lives.

Teachers, parents, professionals, and celebrities are all setting the same example, and students are nothing if not impressionable.

They Have to Learn It Somewhere

Learning has a tendency to happen in spite of instruction, as well as in its absence. The passive instruction that drives students to skimp on sleep and compromise heavily on diet is an early life experience that will stick with them like an addiction well into adulthood.

We can’t take for granted that posters promoting apples and carrots will enter student minds by osmosis and ingrain a strong sense of what food is supposed to be–especially in the face of a contradictory message about what food is, presented by cafeterias, vending machines, and student dependence on energy drinks to survive the school day.

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Matthew Lynch published in Physical Fitness, Policy & Reform

Cut Sports, Advance Academics

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Edgar Wilson

We need to get sports out of schools.

As an extra-curricular, sports should already be distinct from academics, but that hasn’t remotely stopped athletic programs from asserting dominance in and out of the classroom. The problem is most pronounced in tertiary education, where university budgets—and, by extension, student fees and tuition—are being coopted to support legacy athletic programs, most notably football.

Football programs—at least in the current conception—are a losing investment for most schools. Maintaining a diversity of athletic options is expensive, and is clearly not supported by the broadcast and viewership patterns of American sports fans. In the US, we want our football, and we want our basketball, and we want it for free.

These same consumer forces upsetting other pillars of the entertainment industry—music, movies, television—are beginning to cripple cable: streaming services.

Disney has been making headlines since the release of its new Star Wars sequel not only because of the record-breaking box office numbers the film is generating, but because the company is still managing to bleed money due to decreasing cable subscriptions, a pattern that undermines the value of its ESPN channels, and the associated advertising revenues.

Broadcasting college sports just can’t guarantee the same returns that made it such a popular money-maker in the past.

Beyond the backwards financial machinations of college sports, there is the fact that, overwhelmingly, K-12 sports are falling into a pay-to-play format that is fundamentally exclusionary. What merit can a sports program have as an avenue for poor or at-risk students to access college, if the cost of participation already bars them from playing in high school?

Yet at the collegiate level, sports teams have become the tent pole holding up the entire institution:

  • Rather than marketing the university based on academics, professional outcomes, research opportunities or expert faculty, their record of athletic accomplishment gets the most publicity
  • Individual payouts are larger (yet fewer) for athletic scholarships, creating a competitive, high-stakes sports culture that trickles down through secondary and even primary school programs
  • Universities must compete in terms of funding, event games, and spectacle in addition to competing on the field of play

In short, the whole mission and focus of universities pivots to accommodate athletics with increasing urgency.

Compromise abounds—even the United States Naval Academy, which graduates over a thousand students with Bachelor of Science degrees while simultaneously training them as officers for the U.S. Navy every year, has augmented its historically high standards to allow its student athletes to compete at the same level as schools lacking its demanding duel mission. Ditto for West Point.

Beyond lowering the bar for education itself, the troubling school-sports marriage is proving hazardous to the health of student athletes—at every level and age cohort.

The medical data coming out on the punishing long-term effects of athletic injuries, overexertion, and cumulative trauma from youth sports is damning. Whether or not it pays off in the form of discounted tuition or admission to a prestigious school, young jocks in full contact sports can more or less count on legacy injuries dogging them for life.

Outside the high-visibility, high-risk arena of football, research indicates that a hyper-competitive culture that prioritizes specialization leaves any youth athletes at risk of chronic injury. It isn’t that the sports themselves are bad, just that the culture surrounding them has made them so. Technophiles look to science to solve the problem of inherently violent contact sports, only to discover that the culture—not the equipment—is what needs to change to save lives.

The compromise of academics to accommodate athletes is troubling. The conflict of interest for universities, students, the public, and the myriad companies and industries that profit of collegiate sports is fundamentally undermining the purpose and potential of American higher education.

Institutions of learning should support student missions of learning—not athletics.

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Edgar Wilson is an Oregon native with a passion for cooking, trivia, and politics. He studied conflict resolution and international relations and has worked in industries ranging from international marketing to broadcast journalism. He is currently working as an independent analytical consultant. He can be reached via email here or on Twitter @EdgarTwilson.

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