NikeKinectTraining

**Nike+ Kinect Training Review:**

 * Do you love to play videogames and love to exercise? Would you love to be able to do them both at the same time? If so, this is the game for you! Nike+ Kinect training is a great piece of software that takes full advantage of the Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 by giving you a personal fitness trainer anytime you need one!**


 * This game is great for beginners by teaching you some of the basics of fitness as well as creating a routine for you to follow each week. When you first turn the game on you will enter in your personal information, “height, weight, age” and then the game will have you stand still and scan your body to create someone of a digital image of yourself. After those steps are completed, you will then select what kind of fitness program you want. You can choose from a variety of options including aerobic, athleticism, strength, and flexibility and more. The game will then give you a benchmark “pretest” to see how you do with a variety of exercises and give you a rating as well as let you know how much “fuel” you burned throughout each workout. The virtual trainer in the game gives you step by step verbal instructions and also models each exercise correctly on the screen. Right away you learn a lot of intensity, duration, frequency, as well as many other vocabulary terms associated with fitness/exercise right away. The Kinect will also measure the angle at which your elbows are at when you are doing pushups or if your knees are going past your toes on your squats.**




 * If you are in great shape and an expert at the gym this game will challenge you with a variety of exercises that you may not have ever tried as well as push you extremely hard. To keep you motivated if has challenges, leader boards, as well as multi player options. With a 40.00 price for the game, it is much cheaper to purchase this game then pay a trainer if you already have an Xbox with Kinect and have lots of space in your living room.** **I consider myself an active person who enjoys exercising 3-4 days a week and was hoping I could learn a few new things from this game. After 60 minutes of playing it, I was shocked at how exhausted I was and how many different exercises I learned to perform at a higher level. I learned quickly how out of shape I really am as well as many new exercises to strengthen my core as well as increase my flexibility and agility. One of the fun facts I learned while playing this game is that jumping rope burns an average of 11 calories per minute and is great for cardio and weight loss. I also learned that this game uses actual muscle terminology and is great for reviewing and learning the actually names of the muscles and not the generic terms like shoulders or thighs.**


 * While playing this game I thought of a few learning principles from Gee’s book. The first one I thought of was the Multiple Routes Principle. There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead and this allows the learner “gamer” to make choices while exploring the alternative styles. I thought of the choices at the start of the game based on what kind of exercises you wished to perform. This allows you to make a custom “path” to achieve your personal fitness goal. A****nother theory I thought of was the “Ongoing Learning principle”. I had to adjust the way I did my lunges based on how the game wanted me to do them. I had always thought I was doing them correctly but when the camera tracked my movements my legs were not going low enough and my back wasn’t perpendicular to the floor. I had to unlearn how I previously did lunges and learn a new technique in order to get the higher level of exercises.**


 * A few other principles that I thought applied to this game are the following:**


 * Active, Critical Learning PrincipleAll aspects of the learning environment (including ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning**


 * Achievement PrincipleFor learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner's level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner's ongoing achievements**


 * Incremental PrincipleLearning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guess the learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or generalizations the learned has founded earlier**


 * My overall view of the game was that it is a fantastic piece of software that is great for those of us who are not intrinsically motivated to exercise. It motivates you to work out and do exercises that are out of your normal routine. I rented the game, but plan on purchasing the game and continuing my workouts. The only flaw that I really found in the game was that it doesn’t tell exactly what you are doing wrong, if you are doing something wrong. You have to turn your head and watch the screen to and adjust yourself according to the model-trainer on the screen.**
 * A teacher could use this in a PE class with a giant projector doing stations throughout the gym. It is a good way to demonstrate and model exercises as well as agility drills. Student could all feel like they were playing the game if they were all doing it together. I feel it could also be more engaging playing a game rather than just doing what a PE teacher asks you to do. If I had the money to start an afterschool program during the winter I would setup stations all around the gym and have challenges/games setup to promote physical activity with the kids in school.**