School Nixes Video Game Plan In Gym Class

Culture

from the not-particularly-athletic dept

You know all those stories about how kids are fat today because they just sit around playing video games, instead of going outside to play? Well, you might think that at least they got some physical activity during gym class at school. Except… a school in Florida had decided to add video games to the portion of their gym class on team sports. The idea was to motivate more students to participate (the school claims that many kids just take a failing grade, rather than actually participate in class). So, the team sports section would involve one day of classroom instruction, two days of actually playing team sports outside, and two days of playing baseball and football video games on Playstations. Certainly an interesting idea in terms of motivating kids, but it’s no surprise that there’s been a bit of outrage about it, and the school’s superintendent has killed the program calling it “an idea whose time will never come.” While I admit that it’s probably not the smartest plan, at least someone’s thinking out of the box to come up with ways to better motivate kids to exercise.