HEALTH & PHYSICAL EDUCATION
It might seem difficult to incorporate health & physical education online games since we want to encourage active living and healthy lifestyles away from the screen. However, we can include aspects of these tools to be used to enhance student learning experiences. Even during on-screen activities, it is important to also have discussions about what they have learned and how this contributes to their daily lives in promoting a healthy lifestyle.
GAMIFICATION RESOURCES TO ENHANCE PHYS. ED LEARNING...
1. PHYSEDGAMES
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Grades: Any
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A site filled with resources on P.E. games/activities for K-Gr. 8.
Curriculum Connections:
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Living Skills; Personal Skills such as personal development of self-awareness and self-monitoring when it comes to their own specific body; Interpersonal Skills such as communication through verbal or non-verbal during play; and Critical and Creative Thinking when processing information and building knowledge to make new connections while learning the rules of play
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Active Living through demonstrating active participation, physical fitness and having the awareness for safety needs
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Movement Competence: Skills, Concepts, and Strategies
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Students gain a greater understanding of the abilities and components required to improve or enhance the quality of their experience
Meaningful Implementation:
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An abundance of resources for PE activities for students. For younger and older students, a great way for them to visualize and choose what they would like to try out. For older students, this is a great chance for them to take on leadership roles to taking ownership of the activities in not only choosing and deciding the game but to run it. This would be a great way to also encourage them to communicate the rules clearly and modify games for simplified versions or increased difficulties. It could also lead to the creation of their own games that requires fitness to a game involved.
2. The PE Shed
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Grade Levels: All!
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Similarly to PHYSEDGAMES, this site also holds an abundant amount of resources on P.E. activities/games. Most importantly, it has warm-up games for students to begin their day.
Curriculum Connections:
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Living Skills; Personal Skills such as personal development of self-awareness and self-monitoring when it comes to their own specific body; Interpersonal Skills such as communication through verbal or non-verbal during play; and Critical and Creative Thinking when processing information and building knowledge to make new connections while learning the rules of play
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Active Living through demonstrating active participation, physical fitness and having the awareness for safety needs
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Movement Competence: Skills, Concepts, and Strategies
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Students gain a greater understanding of the abilities and components required to improve or enhance the quality of their experience
Meaningful Implementation:
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Instead of video explanation from the previous link above, this shows visual designs of activities. This is a great way to introduce P.E. activity designs that make it easy to understand and to show students visually on what they will be participating in. Other ideas of implementation could be that older students can also explore the website to plan and lead their activities for the day. Younger students can choose which activities they want to add to their pool of activities. For example, drawing the name of the activities from a virtual hat or spinner to decide which activities they will be doing.
3. QR Stopwatch
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Grade Levels: All!
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A nifty tool that generates unique QR code for scanning purposes and creates a spreadsheet of recorded times.
Curriculum Connections:
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Physical Fitness: Students take on the responsibilities of keeping track of their timing and scores. Whether it improves or not on certain activities and understanding what they may have eaten or done beforehand
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Allowing the opportunity to draw comparisons and observations whether there is a difference between a long stretch time vs. short stretch time and other health-related fitness-based activities using the training principles like frequency, intensity, and duration
Meaningful Implementation:
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Creates a fun way for students to have their own QR and when they are doing timed activities, they can scan their own QR to record the data and see how they compare to everyone else or setting up their own goals for improvements.
4. Sortify: Nutrition
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Grade Levels: 6-8
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Game about sorting different food/ingredients into buckets. The player can choose to label buckets from various topics and add the relevant items. Points are awarded for correct items in the right labelled bucket. The higher the point values, the more challenging it is in deciding whether or not the items fit the labels.
Curriculum Connections:
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Healthy Living, part of Making Healthy Choices, this introduces students to research the food and ingredient items to understand certain terminologies
Meaningful Implementation:
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Students will be encouraged to educate themselves when it comes to food or ingredient items. This promotes self-exploration in understanding which items go into specific labels. The label with higher the points, the more complexity is shown in eating items together. Students will find themselves organizing everyday food and ingredients they experience and understand what nutrient information is on their food.
5. Digestion Tutorial
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Grade Levels: 5-6
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This is a tutorial on learning about the digestion track in your body. It provides easy to understand the description of the organs and gradually increase in difficulties with the two-level of games. The tutorial ends with a quiz to test students’ knowledge of the digestive systems.
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http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/health/anatomy/digestion/digestion_tutorial.htm
Curriculum Connections:
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Making Healthy Choices, this activity encourages students to think about how food travels through their digestive system. The activity teaches students about organs absorbing different nutrients to support a healthy body.
Meaningful Implementation:
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Putting this hand in hand with understanding food labels and nutrition facts is a great way to spark discussions about how the body consumes food differently and making healthier food choices for the body.
6. Teeth Eating
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Grade Levels: 4-5
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This is a Teeth and Eating learning module by the Children’s University of Manchester. Students can follow along each section to learn more about the teeth and how it gets affected when eating food. Most sections include interactive activities and follow with a quiz at the end.
Curriculum Connections:
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Healthy Living, learning about the teeth and eating habits are all related to realizing the impacts of personal food selections.
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This can lead to discussions about daily routines and eating addictions. Students will learn to understand the functions of the types of teeth in their mouth.
Meaningful Implementation:
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Students are taken on a journey through the module about the development of their teeth and to maintain a healthy set of teeth. This module allows the student to engage in clicking on the interactive visual graphics to have a personal sense of connection towards the activities.
FURTHER SUBJECT-SPECIFIC RESEARCH...
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The Gamification of Everything – Including Phys Ed
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E-collection ‘Exergames, Active Games and Gamification of Physical Activity’
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Gamification of health education: Schoolchildren’s participation in the development of a serious game to promote health and learning
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The Top 15 Examples of Gamification in Healthcare
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Gamification of Health Education: Schoolchildren’s Participation in the Development of a Serious Game to Promote Health and Learning
