The design and evaluation of a classroom exergame

Abstract

Balancing academic, physical and emotional needs of students while maintaining student interest is increasingly challenging in the resource constrained environments of the modern classroom. To answer this need we created and evaluated an exergame system called Vortex Mountain, which leverages the physical benefits of exercise and the motivational benefits of educational games to provide a healthy and engaging classroom activity for middle school students. Through a controlled study, we demonstrate that our classroom exergame provides similar affective, engagement, and learning benefits to an exercise or game intervention, while leveraging the valuable ancillary benefits of each. Thus, we believe that exergames have a future in the modern classroom and possess significant potential for future technical and pedagogical research.