Annually, the University of South Florida’s physical education teacher education students present at the FAHPERD (Florida Alliance of Health Physical Education Recreation and Dance) conference. Each year the students discuss ideas for the presentation in order to provide a quality hands on workshop. This year the USF students decided they would like to focus on fitness stations – about video games! So how in the world did they come up with video game stations to deliver the message of fitness components? If you think they chose to use exergaming stations….you are actually incorrect. The USF students have been trained to implement exergaming in the physical education classroom. However, they wanted to turn the video game concept into fitness stations “without” using technology; that is exactly what they did – with quality!
The title of the presentation was “Get Fit, Get Hearty, at the Mario Party”. The USF students took the video game “Mario Brothers” and created five fitness stations that would have a focus on developing either muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance, and/or flexibility. Not active gaming by definition but certainly activity using the “gaming” concept! Here is a brief outline of the stations:
Station 1- Mario Cardio: This station will have the different characters’ pictures from the game Mario brother’s on a laminated card. These cards will be turned over so students blindly choose a card out of the “deck”. The students will then perform that character’s skill theme. For example Mario skips, Luigi Leaps, Donkey Kong walks like a monkey etc. They will have to do as many of these as they can in an allotted amount of time traveling a short distance to collect a coin box.
Station 2- Peaches Blackberry: Peach must text Mario and quick; however, in this station we are emphasizing flexibility and allowing the students to stretch from letter to letter and text a message. Students will be given a message and they must rotate different body parts to touch the next letter without leaving the previous letter.
Station 3- Luigi’s I pod touch: At this station students will start about five feet away from Luigi’s I Pod which will have a variety of different applications or “mobile apps” with letters of a character’s first name. Students toss a bean bag towards these applications and whichever one is hit represents the muscular activity the student performs. The student will roll a dice to find out how many repetitions they will complete.
Station 4- Save Mario Worlds from viruses: At this station students are chosen to be the heroic anti-viruses that fight off terrible viruses to restore Mario World to its normal working condition. There are 3 separate lands in Mario World that must be saved: Yoshi’s Land, Star Road and The Forest of Illusion. Each land is saved once the appropriate index card is found and the student performs the task specified on the back of the index card. Index cards will be hidden beneath equipment surrounding the students. Once the student finds and solves one card, they place that card back where they found it and find another index card but this time one that is labeled with a different Land.
Station 5- Koopa Troopa Smash: At this station students will perform a variety of skill themes in the Koopa Troopa Smash. There will be three pathways of poly dots in which students will be asked to jump, hop, and leap onto different Mario objects such as Goombas and Ducks. They will be encouraged to smash the “bad guys” and jump for coins.
3 comments:
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This sounds very fun and interesting!! I would like to know how everything go with the workshop.
The workshop went very well. The space the students had to teach the lesson was small but the packed with interested teachers. The lesson went well and the student did a fantastic job of making the Mario lesson applicable to other video games.
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