When the faculty at Conlee Elementary School in Las Cruces, N.M. began having students do 5 minutes of Just Dance, an active video game for Nintendo's Wii, at the first 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 rush out of their teachers working out with them," she says. "We are having a bully time."
The dance activity is spread into classrooms that have TV monitors. Madrid was divine to try this approximation by researchers at New Mexico State University who are investigating the use of active video games as percentage of an obesity-prevention project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The researchers have offered children and adults the chance to bring active games at a laundromat in Hawaii, an after-school curriculum 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 king of exergames is they are fun and interesting and bury the actor in the action 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 yearly meeting of the Obesity Society in San Diego.
Stepping up physical action is one of the pillars of first lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign to reduce childhood obesity. About a tierce of children and adolescents - 25 million kids - are obese or overweight, which puts them at a greater chance of developing type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other health problems.
Kids are alleged to do an hour or more of moderate-intensity to vigorous aerobic physical activity each day, government guidelines say. But not all children see that goal for many reasons, including not getting enough time in PE classes or at recess, living in neighborhoods where it's not good to work outside and spending too much time being sedentary in face of the computer, TV and video games.
Better than sitting
Some people believe active gaming can help release 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 simply 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 likewise establish 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 actually enjoy."
The games are a postscript to other activities and sports and not a substitute for getting away to play soccer or tag, he says.
"What I've been telling people is that they are sure a whole lot better than sitting on the couch playing the handheld video games where you do nothing, but I believe it's a stretch to think that buying one of these games will exchange the motivation 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 years a week for 12 weeks.
Findings: The dancing provided a chair to vigorous workout, halted weight increase 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 almost half of the primary schools, and teachers are using the action 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 on the wall will get up and dancing to DDR."
Murphy is now studying whether active gaming boosts children's self-confidence, and whether that advance 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 part of a school day "sounds like a grand 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 number of space. You don't get to school teachers. You can drive the button, and the kids get more activity."
He also applauds the theory 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 set for test-taking." Those are likewise among the reasons that corner 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 need to get the kids outdoors, where they can run some more freely. We actually need to teach kids activities such as basketball, baseball, soccer, volleyball. We want to instruct them teamwork."
These are the kinds of skills kids ask for a life of physical activity, he says. "Doing some sort of exergame may be better than no PE or bad PE, but I don't mean it's as well as good PE."
Charlene Burgeson, executive director of the National Association for Disport and Physical Education, a grouping of physical education professionals, says, "We want to see kids where they are, and if active video games get them moving, then all the better."
That said, "when the games are exploited in PE, they want to refer to the skills and knowledge that's being taught. It inevitably to be added value to the instruction," she says. "Physical education is not only about being active, it's about being active for the role of learning."
Other ways to move
Chamberlin says it's important for schools to make strong PE programs, and she sees the games as another tool.
"This is not about replacing traditional PE. We are not talk about taking kids off the basketball court and having them play bowling on Wii Sports- we're talking about taking passive time and fashioning it active," she says.
Kids want to hear how to work 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 dear for some schools, but the lessons learned from this research can be merged 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 5 minutes, and they don't want to modify their place or clothes, she says. "We get to have kids tons of different activity options so they figure out, 'Oh, that's the way I wish to move.'
"People in our country need as many ways as possible to be active."
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