December 17, 2007
Can DDR help school children become more active?Officials in Nova Scotia believe it might help. As reported by The Daily News, Health Promotion and Protection Minister Barry Barnet said that, while digital tech can make kids sedentary, it can also be part of the solution:
Maybe we need to reach out to the industry itself and encourage them to develop more games that are interactive.
Phys-ed teacher Bunny Shields said that DDR is very popular in her gym classes:
I've had girls that have been very inactive in class, and it's hard to get them going and get them motivated, and I've had really good success with [DDR].
Comments
Re: Nova Scotia Considers Dance Dance Revolution to Enhance
Hearing news about how some schools are going to videogames in order to get kids more active, healthy, and in shape, but what we find the most interesting thing about this story is that Dance Dance Revolution seems to be getting more girls active and playing where they were once inactive.
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Kyle
nova scotia drug rehab
Not every game is a "killing simulator"
The fact that this evil interactive "jumping simulator" is brought into the class room just disgusts me.
Ha, ha, just kidding. Yeah, DDR and other dancing games are a fun way to get exercise. It makes me sad that in my current apartment the floors are too weak for me to play *sigh*.
That said, holy crap the kids in that picture are jumping high. They're going to hurt themselves doing that *laughs*.
Curb Curb Stomp Revolution: American History X edition
We finally get some good news around here
:D :D :D :D
Sorry, I just HAD to be sarcastic.
Really, though, I do like such games (though I'm not a big fan of DDR). Even sports games for the Wii are very helpful. And I've seen a number of coin-op games that are EXCEPTIONAL when it comes to physical fitness.
Nightwng2000
NW2K Software
The peripherals and the fact that the music has to be licensed from the musicians makes that are hard market to enter and be profitable in. I mean there is DDR and pump it up.
In fact, it was the only thing that kept me in shape in college, since I stopped playing sports.
I think games that aren't interactive are called movies, thank you.
Heh, that quote reminds me of something Jessica Alba once said about a cell phone game she helped design- "It's gonna be like an interactive thing". OH REALLY! Well, I am helping design a car for Toyota, and it's gonna be like a THING ON WHEELS!
I learned that when I spoke to my Global Geography teacher (who also was the dance teacher). She told me about it when one of our casual conversations brought up video games. I think the whole idea was to teach them to keep the rhythm, iirc.
When we did our SafeGrad celebration on graduation night (A wicked all night party I will never forget) she had the DDR game set up for 2p versus as one of the events. It was fun, but the mats slid around so much my centered foot would wind up standing on the right arrow. Go for left, miss, look down, my foot stepped on the center. Also one of the mats was near unusable, making the game very lopsided, and she used a projecter which I sometimes would wind up in front of so I couldn't even see what I was supposed to be doing. I'd just see a silhouette of myself.
Good times, good times.
I think they were considering it as an add-on to the phys-ed course long before this article came to be, about 2 or so years ago. I will see if I can find out anything about the future of this plan and let you guys know, although someone'll probably beat me to it anyway.
They need to invest in some high quality mats though. ^^
fyi: I don't hate first person shooters, I just think there are too many of them.