April 2007 — Features
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Gaming :: Eat Breakfast, Drink Milk, Play Xbox
Lieberman has done extensive research in the field of educational gaming and has developed a series of health-related video games that address diabetes, smoking prevention, and asthma. The games were created for the Nintendo gaming platform and distributed free of charge to drug companies and doctors’ offices, which then passed them on to their patients.
BYTESIZE
“We wanted to develop confidence in children’s ability to take care of themselves and then develop good health-behavior changes,” Lieberman says. “The games were not responsible for teaching kids about the disease and how to deal with it—they already knew that. The games removed the stigmas of the conditions and helped reinforce and boost communication about them. It increased the social support for the kids.”
That psychological boost seemed to translate into profound physical benefits. Lieberman and her team of researchers found in clinical trials that the asthma game, for example, reduced urgent care visits by 40 percent among the 200 asthmatic children it tested, and it decreased the number of missed school days. The diabetes game resulted in a 77 percent drop in doctor visits among its school-age participants (outpatients of diabetes clinics at Stanford University Medical Center and at a Kaiser Permanente clinic), from an average of 2.5 to 0.5 visits per year, she says.
“It was learning by doing, which works well,” Lieberman says, “especially if the game is highly interactive.”
Getting FIT
About 200 schools across the country have signed up with Generation FIT (Fitness, Integration, and Training), a soup-tonuts program designed to infuse daily exercise into curriculum and counter the de-emphasizing of gym class due to budget cuts. Generation FIT uses a video dance game in the style of Dance Dance Revolution called In the Groove, as well as other interactive video games such as Guitar Hero and Tetris. To play Guitar Hero, students stand on an elevated pad and mimic the movements of a guitarist on a video screen. The game helps improve hand-eye coordination and balance—it’s not easy to stay on that pad. And this Tetris is not the familiar falling-blocks handheld unit; this game is played on the same mat used for In the Groove, and the students physically move the blocks around the mat. In addition to promoting physical fitness, the program encourages team building, leadership, and social interaction, and it intends to boost students’ selfesteem, according to program creator Judy Shasek, a veteran in education and fitness program development.
The idea behind Generation FIT is to incorporate gaming into the classroom setting, in an unpopulated area of the room, to allow kids to get up and play the games at different intervals to keep their minds focused and re-energize them throughout the school day. Schools use the games in a number of different situations, as a replacement for a traditional gym program, or simply as a reward for students getting their work done early and correctly or for having overcome a hurdle.
