EXERCISE

students had to work together to hit the correct letters one after the other.”R! R! R! R!” they yelled to one another.

Klara Petreska, 8, who will be a thirdgrader at Violet Elementary School, concentrated hard on her target. She said she is looking forward to playing with the system when she gets to middle school in a couple of years.

“It’s good,” said 10-year-old Matthew Cline, as he wound up to throw. His mother, Kristin Cline, is the assistant principal at Diley. “It’s fun. I like the math game the best.”

The $17,000 system required the district to install in each gymnasium a projector, a sound system and 3D cameras that can detect multiple objects at the same time. The company automatically will add games as they become available; it’s hoping to add four or five a month.

Brian Seymour, Pickerington schools’ The Pickerington school district hopes to expand the program now in use at Diley Middle School. It’s the only school in Ohio trying the program.

director of instructional technology, just happened to see a Facebook post several months ago from a friend of his, a physical education teacher at another district, talking about how he wished his school would buy something like the Lu device.

Seymour researched it and asked the district’s physical education teachers what they thought. The middle schools (grades five and six in Pickerington) were chosen because the games aligned the best with the curriculum, he said.

Pickerington is one of three districts in the United States, and the only one in Ohio, to try this technology, Seymour said. Lu has installed systems in schools in 15 countries.

“It’s all about how can we reimagine some of those different

courses?” Seymour said. “What research has shown is that kinesthetics and movement really allow you to retain information.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, students who are physically active tend to have better grades, attendance, memory and classroom behavior.

Experts recommend a minimum of 60 minutes of moderate physical activity daily for those ages 6 to 19. But only about 21.6 percent of kids in that age group actually move that much even five days per week, according to the CDC.

Teachers see a sharp drop-off in student interest in physical education among middle-schoolers, Seymour said. The district hopes that introducing something novel will keep them engaged and establish a lifelong habit of movement.

“This (technology) relates to the world we’re living in,” said Diley physical education teacher Greg Van Kannel, referring to how it blurs the line between subject areas.

Near the middle of the school year, after the students have gotten well-acquainted with the technology, Lu representatives plan to visit Pickerington to launch a design challenge in which students will create their own game for the system, which will be shared with other schools that use Lu.