Redbridge Primary ICT Consultant: Walk to School Week and Walk with Me

I visited a school today to help them think about how they could integrate ICT into Walk to School Week. Here are are a couple of tools we looked at:

We could use the Zero Footprint Site to help children to investigate and visualise their Carbon Footprint:

What this site does it to pose a series of questions about your lifestyle and the calculate your impact on the planet. You can then compare your data with the average use in your country. Note this is Canadian site but you can still look at UK figures and compare your footprint with National average.

I am not too happy with my results as it looks like i need to make some changes fast, my lifestyle is costing the earth!

On the whole this is a very good sight and looks like it could really bring data handling and environment education together. You may need to explain some of the Canadian questions, like ‘Do you have a cottage?’, but this is a small issue.

The other tool that this school will be using and on a small scale is -

‘Walk with Me’, for Nintendo DS. I can not believe that no-one has done anything yet with this game. Its another one of those games/tools that Nintendo market towards 30 somethings for self improvement and yet has real appeal for Key Stage 2 use.

With Walk with Me, you carry round an activity meter for a day and then download your step to the DS at the end of the day via infa red in the device. This is like twenty first century Data-Logging. Then the software displays your steps for the day and points out how long you have been still and ho long your were on the move. The great thing about this is that the game allows you to use your Nintendo MII to show your steps and you can use energy gained during the day to play simple games, like powering light bulbs. Extra motivation is given by attributing your activity level to an animal. In the last month I was mostly described as either a galloping horse or a busy ant, which feels ok.

During the summer I got very excited about the educational potential of this tool and emailed whoever I could get hold of at Nintendo. Just think what would happened if we gave a class of 30 an activity meter and they competed against themselves and each other during Walk to School Week. However it has fallen on deaf Nintendo ears as we still await a reply.

In the meantime in the school I visited today, they’ll be using two activity meters and pitting the head teacher against another member of staff to see who makes the greatest number of steps during the week. Perhaps Consolarium will pick this one up, or have already