Aplicación móvil Endomondo para promocionar la actividad física en estudiantes de educación secundaria (Endomondo smartphone app to promote physical activity in high school students)

Abstract

Mobile applications are integrated into students’ lives and, therefore, their use for educational purposes can become a resource to improve the learning-teaching process. Simultaneously, the use of applications can help increase the level of motivation in the integration of physical activity into their day-to-day life and extracurricular time. The objective of the didactic experience was to analyze the effect of the use of the Endomondo application in Physical Education subject. In the didactic experience, with a quasiexperimental design without pretest, 138 students in the third and fourth years of Compulsory Secondary Education (64 girls and 74 boys; 15.4±0.5 years) agreed to participate voluntarily in this research. It was implemented in a secondary high school in the southern of Spain, with a medium socio-culture index and integrated into the curriculum of the subject of Physical Education. The students carried out collective challenges by group-class as well as individually. The results showed that a majority of the students participated (81.7%), with family involvement, in addition to the generic achievement of the collective (83.3%) and individual challenges (84.4%). The use of new technologies can be an educational resource that helps increase the amount of time adolescents dedicate to physical activity.