In the UK, Wii fit has been accused of coining the term “fat” for kids that are over weight.  In response, parents of obese children say that their kids are big but also in the best shape of their life. Wii fit uses in game terminology to describe one’s BMI or Body mass index, as a part of the BMI measurement system.  Nintendo did apologize to its customers saying that data collected by Wii Fit is based on height and weight, to determine a player’s relative obesity.  Specialists say that, rather than parents taking advantage of the game’s accusations they are in denial and continue to say that Nintendo is wrong.  The only reason why parents are disappointed with the Wii Fit is because they know that the in game terminology that is used, well unfortunately, is an actual depiction of their children. Yes, the game’s terminology may have psychological affects on the kids, but they must realize that their current situation is not at all healthy and that the only way that they are going to do something about their weight is only if they are consistently reminded about their weight – even by a video game. Whats your take?

Asad

One of the many great things Wii can do is to measure BMI or body mass index. A ten year girl was not anticipating the news that she was over weight and was apparently very disturbed by the information. Her family had to that she was in fact not over weight even if the system was right.

The blog poses a good question, is this just drama and will it affect the reception of this technology in the future? Can the math be wrong? One thing is for sure, an age limit for use probably has to be set in order to avoid problems like this. Then again, the ages of children with obesity are becoming lower and lower and the sooner families become aware of this, the better off those children are in warding off the potential consequences of obesity. With obesity, come potentially life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, but these are just a few of the many complications and warnings should be taken seriously.

Who knows, the Wii fit might make you a little more conscious of what you’re in for in the future. Hopefully, people don’t take the information as an attack and instead embrace it as a life-saver.

BMI Controversy

Hey everyone,

I really apologize for not writing sooner. I’ve been a little busy with family and school things.  Please stay tuned for more on gaming and health.  I also have to tell you all about more event details from last Saturday.  Thanks for reading!

Our Press Release:

Healthy Kids Day at the Garfield YMCA

VERTICES is partnering up with Garfield Health Department, the Garfield YMCA, and HARP of HUMC to bring a new event to the 2008 Healthy Kids Day. Healthy Kids Day is the nation’s largest health day for children and is part of YMCA Activate America, an initiative designed to help children and adults adopt and sustain health lifestyles. This year, Healthy Kids Day will occur on April 12, 2008 from 9:00am to 4:00pm at the Garfield YMCA Outwater Lane facility. The day will be full of great activities for children and their families.

The Extreme Nintendo Wii Tournament is designed to get children involved with physical activities without the stress of performing outside the comfort of the indoors. Activities such as these allow children to use technology to get fit. The purpose of bringing Wii to Garfield’s children is to see how well the reception of technology is amongst children and to find out whether it is a good way to get children to embrace exercise, introducing a new trend of health-gaming. Garfield Fitness Unity Nutrition (F.U.N) program is already utilizing interactive mapping technology to promote children to participate outdoor activities collecting community asset mapping and healthy food choices and this technological approach to fitness can prove to be a great addition to the Garfield F.U.N. program

The schedule of activities is as follows:

9:00am – 10:00am Family Aerobics

10:00am – 12:00pm Nintendo Wii Play

10:00am – 10:45am Healthy Cooking Class

10:45am – 11:15am Belated Easter Egg Hunt

11:15am – 12:00pm Arts & Crafts Project

12:00pm – 12:45pm HEALTHY LUNCH

12:45pm – 2:00pm Nintendo Wii Tournament

2:00Pm – 4:00pm Family Swim Open Pool

Please join us for the Extreme Nintendo Wii Challenge Tournament as we kick off our first project about using video games to promote healthy lifestyles. The address for Garfield YMCA is: 33 Outwater Ln, Garfield, NJ 07026.

If you have any questions or would like further information please call Dr. Wansoo Im at 609-651-1352 or email at wim@vertices.com. To find out more please visit www.garfieldfun.org or healthgame.wordpress.com

Google Earth maps refugee crises
I happened to come across this interesting article on CNN yesterday.  Google Earth has created a way to look at the refugee camps and other areas of great need in the world.  The layer is called Global outreach and has some really interesting features. I suggest experimenting with Google Earth- it truly give one insight about things happening outside our US bubble.

“The Center for Government Services of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy has created the Online Data Book allowing users to work with maps and data regarding counties, municipalities, schools, and state and federal legislative districts of New Jersey. Users can investigate population, voting, economics, education, etc. Plea

A public service of CGS, the Online Data Book allows users to analyze and map data for counties, municipalities, school districts, state legislative districts, and federal Congressional districts in New Jersey. Population, housing, schools, voting, and fiscal and economic profiles and maps illustrating the data may be displayed and saved in electronic form.

The datasets contained in this version of the Data Book are more limited than the published versions. To find out more about the Data Book, or to purchase a copy, go to: [http://www.policy.rutgers.edu/cgs/pub.php]“

Check out this article on what people are thinking about Wii Fit and decide if it’s for you!   Wii Fit

Stay tuned for more information on health games!

Inspire Data is a simplified spreadsheet and graphing program.  I imagine this is the type of program that would be best used by elementary school children to middle school aged children.  The exercises they provide are interesting and engage the children in a search for information and clues from the data. It actually seems quite similar to geocaching or that it could be used for that purpose.

-good for organizing data such as changes over time of a location,  population, # of injuries, immigration, etc.

It has its quirks but I’m still working on figuring these things out:
-you can’t graph a lot of data at once (about 11 classes of data
at once, what if there’s a class of 25 students?)
- hard to tell where the independent and dependent  variables need
to be on the axis because you have a choice about where you can
put them
- need pages of instructions to figure out how it works, not ideal
for younger aged children

Also, need to find out if it is compatible with our GIS programs so that we can use it.  This might be helpful for the RAMS Camp kids I’ve discussed in the past, when they come back home to find things they learned about at camp. It is easy to transfer data to excel if needed and then convert it to something we can use with mappler or our GIS programs .

This is what I have seen so far. I will tell you more once I learn other functions like: how to convert data into graphs and charts and.

The Center for Government Services of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy has created the Online Data Book allowing users to work with maps and data regarding counties, municipalities, schools, and state and federal legislative districts of New Jersey. Users can investigate population, voting, economics, education, etc. Please visit the website to see the great potential in the use of NJ Data Online.

Rutgers: Center for Government Services