Thesis

In order to prevent the spread of COVID, many schools have canceled all sports, arts, music, and other after-school activities. Students are asked to leave the campus as soon as lessons are over.

This has caused students to miss out on all the fun they have at school and also deprive them of physical exercise, social connection, and team building opportunities. 

By using the Social Fitnessing - Virtual Relay Competition, we hope to get the students to play, get moving and challenge each others as a team at the comfort of their own homes or anywhere safe. 

INITIAL SKETCHES

Initial Sketches

Initial Storyboard

INITIAL PROTOTYPE

Smartwatch-like device

Clip-on device with adjustable bend

STORYBOARD

Sample Challenges

Precedents

Nintendo Switch: Using motion sensors and camera to track the movement of the users

Pokemon GO: Using GPS and mobile devices for location-specific and time-sensitive quests

TikTok Dance Challenge: Users need to copy the dance move set by other users and upload their version of it.

Special Features

1. Student Agency: Students can create challenges for other students to complete. This is very useful as we adults can never know what the students would find fun and interesting. However, the teachers will screen the challenges for dangerous or inappropriate actions. 

2. Diversity: In addition to physical exercise and dance type challenges, students can create orienteering/scavenger hunt type challenge, art/music challenge, parent-child challenge, cooking challenges etc. This can ensure non-athletic kids can also participate in the competition.

3. Versatility: The wearable device can be worn at different parts of the part of the body. The device will capture the motion of the body part and tie to the specific challenges, e.g. running, dancing, skipping. 

4. Time and location-specific challenges: Borrowing from the feature from Pokémon Go, time-sensitive or location-specific challenges can be added. This would be adjusted depending on the social distancing guidelines given by the authorities. 

5. Helping those in need in a time of crisis: Subject to availability of sponsorship or school budget, the teams can convert their points into tokens and pick a charity they want to help. 

FINAL DRAWINGS

Flats

Collage/Detail Drawings

FINAL PROTOTYPE IMAGES

Close up of the wearable device

Side of the wearable device 

FINAL PROTOTYPE IMAGES

Device being wear on different parts of the body for different challenges

Reflections and Future

One of our biggest uncertainty of the project is how well the students would like to play such a virtual competition. We discovered that very often adults would assume what the children would be interested to play and it is often wrong. If time allows, we would love to collect the real pain points and interest from the children in our target age group (age 8-12). 

Another concern we have is that this project relies heavily on application development. The UI and UX would greatly determine whether this would take off.