This study underscores the value of games in not only increasing children’s awareness of their physical activity levels, but encouraging them to increase them. Such an approach can foster long-term behavioural change and therefore future research should seek to incorporate longer intervention periods. The present pilot study, as opposed an observational or randomised controlled trial, reports the effects of the design choice and offers specific component guidance, which could be refined for future research.
As shown in Figure \ref{fig:mission1}, the fastest teams completed the assault course in less than 80 seconds, but were active for around 10-20 minutes during the session. This shows that the time spent engaging with the activity itself does not have to last the whole session to be effective. For this activity, the time spent very active (as shown in Figure \ref{fig:fit1}) does not seem to be increasing or decreasing significantly over the week, probably due to the total engagement time being so short.
While some teams (e.g. red, purple) seem to have improved over the course of the week, this was not the case for all teams. Care should be taken if the metric “complete activity faster than previous day” is used as a trigger for a motivator, where the motivator is e.g. a short animation or motivational piece of text.
The time spent finding the token (Figure \ref{fig:mission2}) is quite variable across the different days of the week, given the nature of the activity. However, completing the mission quickly (e.g. the green team on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday) did not necessarily mean that they would spend less time being active during the entire session.
One outlier is the silver team, which took an unusually long time (23:10) to find the token on the first day. This is also reflected in their step count and amount of physical activity, as shown in Figure \ref{fig:fit2}.
This mission stimulated the largest amount of physical activity during the session compared to the other missions. Teams consistently spent at least 10 minutes active during the session, with high levels of being fairly active and very active.
In this mission, where teams were specifically asked to try and increase their step count compared to the previous day, the amount of physical activity performed fluctuates throughout the week. The time recorded as being very active is less than with Mission 3.
One of the biggest obstacles during the installation of the ambient display was trying to establish a connection to an internet server via the school network. As we were using an Arduino microcontroller with an Ethernet shield, it was quite challenging to negotiate network authentication via the school’s proxy server. If possible, it is recommended to use a GPRS/GSM shield or similar when installing Internet-connected prototypes in-the-wild, as the existing network infrastructure could cause unexpected problems.
It can also be challenging to come up with ten easily distinguishable colours using RGB LEDs. When mixing RGB colours using LEDs, the colour black is not available, and it becomes difficult to tell the colours brown and orange apart. Figure \ref{fig:colours} show the final colour palette we came up with.
Other practical considerations include that if you want the teacher to provide data, give a template with the required format. This helps to not have to unnecessarily transcribe data, for example converting “1 min 48 sec” to “00:01:48”.