New game for students will teach healthy living

This fall, about 90 freshmen living in Briscoe Quad’s Fitness and Wellness Living-Learning Center will play an eight-week-long multimedia game geared toward helping students adopt healthy lifestyle choices.

“The Skeleton Chase” is a mystery game of sorts set on campus during which students will attempt to solve weekly clues after completing mental and physical exercises meant to complement lecture material in HPER P105: Foundations of Fitness and Wellness.

Students will receive the clues via e-mail, text message and Web searches through the class’s Web site. Along the way, they will be able to upload their exercise history and chart their progress on a special Web site made especially for the game, Johnston said.

This year, the game will replace the lab component of P105, which is a required class for students in the Fitness and Wellness LLC, said Jeanne Johnston, an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology.

“The Skeleton Chase” was developed by Johnston, Anne Massey, the Dean’s research professor in the Kelley School of Business Department of Operations and Decision Technologies and Lee Sheldon, an assistant professor in the Department of Telecommunications.

The Fitness and Wellness LLC is one of the many “learning communities” for freshmen, which work to provide students with like interests a supportive environment to learn and socialize. About 350 freshmen live at the Fitness and Wellness LLC each year, Johnston said. In P105, students learn about proper nutrition and exercise, along with stress-management techniques to help them acclimate to university life.

The idea for the game came from a study led by Johnston that compared the health of students living in the Fitness and Wellness LLC to those living in other residence halls. Initial physiological data collected for the study found that 46 percent of the students presented two or more risk factors for cardiovascular disease, Johnston said. Additionally, Johnston found that “the college student population is unaware of and/or inattentive to individual risk factors and health status, which may impact long term health.”

IU received a grant in May from the Health Games Research program through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which works to improve Americans’ health, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation news release. Grants from the foundation were also given to 11 other colleges and universities around the U.S. in order to support projects that use a multimedia approach to promote healthier lifestyles in people of all ages, according to the release.

Sheldon, the game’s designer, said while the game aims to improve student health, he stressed that is not overtly educational.

“This isn’t a ‘health’ game,” he said. “It is a game like any other that just happens to have the added benefit of making players fitter and healthier. Like basketball.” 

Massey said she will be evaluating the strengths and weakness of design elements of “The Skeleton Chase” in order to improve the game and create ones like it in the future. This, she said, will focus on finding elements of the game “that engage players and, importantly, causes them to want to continue to play.”

In the fall, the team hopes The Skeleton Chase will help students incorporate physical activity and better nutrition into their daily lives, as well as teach them how to deal with stress.

“In the end, we hope students who play this game will walk away with the skills to make healthy life choices in college and beyond,” Johnson said.