School Nixes Video Game Plan In Gym Class
from the not-particularly-athletic dept
You know all those stories about how kids are fat today because they just sit around playing video games, instead of going outside to play? Well, you might think that at least they got some physical activity during gym class at school. Except... a school in Florida had decided to add video games to the portion of their gym class on team sports. The idea was to motivate more students to participate (the school claims that many kids just take a failing grade, rather than actually participate in class). So, the team sports section would involve one day of classroom instruction, two days of actually playing team sports outside, and two days of playing baseball and football video games on Playstations. Certainly an interesting idea in terms of motivating kids, but it's no surprise that there's been a bit of outrage about it, and the school's superintendent has killed the program calling it "an idea whose time will never come." While I admit that it's probably not the smartest plan, at least someone's thinking out of the box to come up with ways to better motivate kids to exercise.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Wouldnt be the first time videogames were in P,E.
A school in California added Dance Dance Revolution to their P.E. classes and it was a huge hit and had very positive results. Now DDR isn't you're typical "video game" but it definatly appeals to the "video gamer" and produced more physical activity then most of these kids are used to.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Ignorant Superintendent.
[ link to this | view in thread ]