| Popis: |
Most children in the US fail to achieve the recommended daily amount of physical activity. This can have deleterious effects on children’s health and academic performance, yet physical education is an often-neglected component of elementary school curricula. Similarly, there is little emphasis on improving computer science knowledge and computational thinking skills in elementary students despite the increasing relevance of computer science. Two initiatives – Project moveSMART and the Sensory Motor Lab – aim to explore and address these issues. Project moveSMART is a collaborative online game made to improve elementary students’ physical activity levels, academic achievement, and computational thinking skills. Students log their physical activity levels to advance through the game, during which they unlock educational content. Much of this content is composed of the moveSMART curriculum, which consists of a series of tutorials that promote physical activity, computational thinking, and learning related to state standards. Project moveSMART was developed as a collaboration between researchers and educators at Hornsby Dunlap Elementary School. A similar collaboration resulted in the development of the Sensory Motor Lab- a space in which students can do physical activities intended to help develop sensorimotor skills. The Sensory Motor Lab consists of ten stations and a system for recording student utilization of the lab for later analysis. This thesis describes Project moveSMART, the moveSMART curriculum, and the Sensory Motor Lab by detailing information relevant to the future users and developers of these projects. We also describe a pilot deployment performed during the Spring of 2021 in which 4th and 5th grade students completed activities from the moveSMART curriculum delivered through the Project moveSMART web application. 4th grade students were familiar with the web application and completed more of the curriculum, while 5th grade students were not familiar with the application and completed a relatively small proportion of the curriculum. We found that 4th grade students had a significantly improved confidence in their coding abilities and perception of coders after the intervention, while 5th grade students did not. This thesis ends by discussing lessons learned from the pilot study, and by making recommendations for future work. |
