Project SMART: A cooperative educational game to increase physical activity in elementary schools

Abstract

Children's rates of physical activity are declining at alarming rates, even given the wealth of evidence that participation in physical activity is positively correlated with better performance in school and long-term health protective factors. In this paper, we describe Project SMART, which directly targets childhood physical activity within the elementary school. The basis of Project SMART is a cooperative educational game originally designed to raise kids awareness of sustainable active transportation to and from school. In Project SMART, we adapt this game to focus on the health and educational benefits of moderate to vigorous physical activity, leveraging organized physical activity opportunities during the school day. In the game, a class cooperatively earns credit for performing physical activity. This credit takes the form of distances traveled on a virtual path (e.g., along Route 66 across the United States). As the class makes progress, they unlock waypoints that contain learning modules defined by their teachers to be directly tied to their curricular content. The paper describes the manner in which Project SMART has used community based-participatory research to develop a game that integrates with the school and community, and reports on the results of a pilot study carried out during the 2019–2020 academic year.