The place for ubiquitous computing in schools: lessons learned from a school-based intervention for youth physical activity

  • Authors:

  • Erika Shehan Poole;Andrew D. Miller;Yan Xu;Elsa Eiriksdottir;Richard Catrambone;Elizabeth D. Mynatt

  • Affiliations:

  • The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

With rising concerns about obesity and sedentary lifestyles in youth, there has been an increasing interest in understanding how pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies can catalyze positive health behaviors in children and teens. School-based interventions seem like a natural choice, and ubiquitous computing technologies hold much promise for these interventions. Yet the literature contains little guidance for how to approach school-based ubicomp deployments. Grounded in our analysis of a large-scale US school-based intervention for promoting youth physical activity, we present an approach to the design and evaluation of school-based ubicomp that treats the school as a social institution. We show how the school regulates students' daily lives, drawing from work in the sociology of schools to create a framing for planning, executing and analyzing school-based ubicomp deployments. These insights will assist other researchers and designers engaging in deployments of ubiquitous computing systems in settings with established institutional structures.