Race Start is an interclass competition package designed for students to battle among classes during their recess time. It included a series of mini-game held inside their school aimed to make traditional exercises not monotonous at all.
Released:
2015
Clients:
School of Design & School of Nursing from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Buddhist To Chi Fat She Yeung Yat Lam Memorial School
Awards:
Entrepreneurship Award of HK PolyU Micro Fund 2016 (HKD$120,000) #
Outstanding Project Award of HK PolyU Entrepreneurship Bootcamp 2016 #
Grand Finalist of Hong Kong Social Enterprise Challenge (HKSEC) 2014 *
Fund received:
Hong Kong Quality Education Fund 2015 with Buddhist To Chi Fat She Yeung Yat Lam Memorial School (HKD$122,400) #
Press release:
Related news:
My Role:
Entire design and development
* under the name of "Exergame Union"
# under the name of "Joy Sports Alliance"
Current Situations
Lack of exercise
The World Health Organisation (WHO) suggested that 5 to 17 years old children and adolescents should have at least an hour of moderate or heavy level of exercise per day. Apparently, our students can not fulfil this suggestion.
On the other hand, research held by the Social Sciences Research Centre of The University of Hong Kong showed that 68.4% of interviewees only meet the minimum or low level of physical energy output per week.
Emotionally unhealthy
Moreover, parents are placing a great expectation on their kid's academic results. This phenomenon creates overwhelming pressure on their kids. For students’ emotional health, playing around with their friends and doing regular exercises can help them to relax and release stress.
Lack of leisure time
Hong Kong teenagers are spending most of their time on studying, including attending school, tutorial classes, and learning a lot of social skills. This brings out the problem that they do not have leisure time to do exercises and playing around.
Importance of exercising
Improve emotional health
Doing exercises can help our body to produce endorphins, which is a chemical that helps us to feel more peaceful and happy. It can also help people to gain a better mood, especially those who have mild depression and low self-esteem.
Improve concentration
Exercising can help people to maintain a better sleep. With better sleep and mood, students will improve their concentration during class. Thus, they can have a better academic results with the same effort, which is their parents' hope as well.
Avoid diseases
Exercising to maintain a healthy weight decreases a person's risk of developing certain diseases, including diabetes and high blood pressure, which used to be found mostly in adults, are becoming more common in teenagers.
Reference
To raise students' interest, attract them to do more exercise, the best way is to hit on their likes. We noticed that a Korean variety show — Running Man had gained a huge fan base in Hong Kong, especially among teenagers.
Running Man is a Korean variety show about competing against the opposite team or individuals, and to be the final winner. In their show, there are a lot of interesting games. They added new elements and rules into ordinary exercises. This makes their games different and interesting.
From Google’s data, Hong Kong ranked the second most searched of "Running Man" on YouTube in the globe in 2014. At the same time, we did a survey targeted Hong Kong secondary school through the Internet, about 66.2% of interviewees had watched Running Man. 35% said they would keep on following the latest episode.
At the same time, we found there were teens organised their own Running Man games in Hong Kong. There are also some posts in FaceBook fan pages that were suggesting their school’s student union to organise Running Man activities. These all showed that Hong Kong secondary school students love watching Running Man and hoped these activity to be held at school.
Objective
Train up students’ exercise habits
Build up students’ health awareness
Develop students’ self-esteem
Enhance cohesion among class
Better use of spare time
Promote "Games = Exercises"
Design concept
Bingo
Bingo is a game of chance played with randomly drawn numbers which players match against numbers that have been pre-printed on 5X5 matrices. As we know the game is limited on a small paper, but we thought that it still has a lot of possibilities to create fun. Therefore, it became one of the elements in our design.
Race Start!
As we mentioned in part one, our design and some games were referenced from the Korean variety show. We took the slogan in the show - “Race Start!”, which is well-known on teenage to be our campaign’s title, in order to match with some of our games from Running Man and to arouse teenager’s curiosity on our activity.
Exercise intensity monitoring
ActiGraph activity monitors/Fitbit trackers were used to measure participants' body movement, exercise intensity and calories burned.
These collected data were considered as students' performance and were counted as their score during our Race Start competition.
Gameplay
Time limit
A round of Race Start will be 50 days. A number will be announced every two days.
There are 14 games in Race Start. 6 Kinect games and 8 physical games. We separated the game into individual mode and class representative mode. For the individual mode, students can play for what they want, but student need to spent the required calories in order to get the class participatory award.
Trump card system
To increase the variation of gameplay and balance the advantage of each class. Trump card gives
a chance for students to reverse the current situation, even the weakest class can also fight back. In the game, students would develop their own strategy to defeat other class with these cards. Therefore, it encourages students to immerse into the game when they are interacting with other class through these cards.
There are 40 trump cards in Race Start. When the class open a number that covered a crown , the class representative can choose any game they want to challenge, they can draw a trump card after successfully challenged the game.
Reward system
Ranking reward
Champion class will receive a set of unique gifts that only given to the champion, which is the Race Start stationery package, and this represents their success and encourages them to participate the game.
Class Participatory Reward
Every student in the class is required to burn at least 1,500 kcal within one round (50 days). The energy burned during warm-up period and class competition period will be counted.
The Class Participatory Rewards encourages students to do exercise and enhance communication and cohesion between them. For example, shy students in the class can also participate in this competition. Besides, the challenge dice also encourages students to have fun and do casual
exer-gaming in leisure time.
Special Pattern Reward
If a class finished challenged a special patterns, their class will win the Special Pattern Reward. This reward cannot be overlap with the Ranking Reward, students can only choose one reward if they win both of them.
Market positioning
We compared our product with existing exer-gaming/gaming centres.
User test
We invited 8 secondary students to test our design. They played for a day to test the games and our campaign’s game flow. We realised that all of them are interested in most of the games. This showed our campaign is feasible to secondary students.
Website design
Race Start! Website is a daily-update platform to record students’ personal profile.
We aim to encourage students keep on checking their exercise results and to raise their health awareness. To let students to be more engaged to the game, we designed to have an online ranking list for class and personal challenges. So they can keep trying the games for a better ranking and build up their self-esteem and confidence.
Development
Race Start was later developed as a exer-gaming package, implemented in The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups in 2014, with 25 participants aged between 7-17 years old.
During the campaign, we collected their health status, amount of exercise, energy expenditure, exercise habit and comments on our events from a set of questionnaire and ActiGraph activity monitors. The questionnaire was referenced to International Physical Activity Questionnaire(IPAQ), Exercise Motivations Inventory (EMI) from University of Wales and Self-Determination Theory(SDT).
Based on the data analysis result, it shows that Race Start cause positive effect on increasing amounts of exercise per week, and encourage students to achieve one hour moderate level of exercise per day.
70% of participants said they are more interested in doing exercise.
70% of participants agreed that exercise can relive stress, expend calories, increase body flexibility, enhance friendship and the competition makes exercising become more fun.
Over 80% participants want to join the campaign again and they prefer the campaign last in a long period.
Around 80% participant are 100% satisfied with the campaign.
More than 90% participants will introduce the campaign to their friends.
Race Start was also implemented in Buddhist To Chi Fat She Yeung Yat Lam Memorial School with the support fund from Hong Kong Quality Education Fund. We combined with elements of sensory integration training, which helped their students with special needs to improve their body control skills, communication skills and the knowledge of technology. Teachers in this school were satisfied with the campaign, they are looking forward to the campaign when it becomes a long-term extra curricular activities at school.
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