Project SportsLab – a sport research and Parkour shoe design challenge.

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Learning through play, finding what drives us, and following the dream of what we can be is the motivation behind SportsLab – the project-based sport research and design challenge created by EdGE, the Educational Gaming Environments group at TERC.

SportsLab teams uncover and connect STEAM and 21st Century Skills to create and propose a shoe design for the sport of Parkour. EdGE is currently conducting a national longitudinal research study to find out whether SportsLab engagement results in improvements in players’ STEM and ICT — Information and Communication Technology — dispositions and career awareness.

We’re hopeful that SportsLab, as well as other design challenges, developed with our QuestLab Editor and infused with STEAM and 21st Century Skills, will help youth to push their limits, find what drives and motivates them … to turn dreams into actions … positive steps that help them compete in the real world.

Environment

The SportsLab on-line environment is a series of locations with resources and a narrative that drives players’ explorations guiding their team to uncover what they need to create a Parkour shoe design that reflects an understanding of sport research and design thinking.

Moving through a series of Milestones, players explore sports research and design thinking, as well as Parkour, engaging both online and in the real world. Players choose an avatar, interact with other players and NPCs, and find resources that will help them in their quest to design a new Parkour shoe. They conduct hands-on activities that support, extend, and apply the concepts introduced on-line. Ultimately, teams create two deliverables to upload and enter in the Parkour Shoe Design Challenge. At the end of the Challenge, judges, including shoe designers and sport researchers will select the top designs that will win prizes from Nike.

Future SportsLab Design Challenges

The EdGE group at TERC has completed our research on SportsLab, but is looking at ways to create future SportsLab Design Challenges. So, if you didn’t get a chance to connect for our last SportsLab Design Challenge, be sure to check back here on the status of SportsLab.

You may also contact us via our e-mail for more information on how your class, school, or other informal STEM setting can participate in future Challenges or if you are interested in using some of SportsLab’s assets and activities on your own.

Sampler

SportsLab is a collection of online and real world experiences for uncovering the STEAM connections between sport shoe design, sport research and design thinking. For example, exploring the Sport Research Lab during a mission focused on outsoles leads a team to an overview of how friction is related to traction and how researchers might study it.

This is extended to the real world through a hands-on activity in which players build an in-class traction tester and then test different outsoles. What teams learn in this mission, as well as the traction tester itself, further the research that supports the team’s Parkour shoe outsole design decisions.

Who is Eva?

Eva is the spokeswoman for SportsLab’s Parkour Shoe Design Challenge.

We modeled her after those kids who have interests in many things outside the classroom, but often sit, disengaged from the learning. Why disengaged? Because too often learning is not tied to anything remotely interesting to them.

In SportsLab, Eva and her science teacher find a project-based connection between Eva’s love of Parkour and STEM learning. Eva meets a variety of characters who help open some doors and inspire her to push herself in Parkour, in class, and in life. Meet some of Eva’s friends in the slideshow below and read more about her story by clicking on the Parkour Comic…