This article is published in collaboration with the Singapore Physical Education Association (SPEA)
Why a Super App for PE could become the PE teachers’ best sidekick
What is a Super App?
How many apps do you have on your phone? If you are like me, it is a lot. Imagine installing just one app that does almost everything, from having your favorite dish delivered to your doorstep, hailing a taxi, having your items delivered or even banking and investing. It does exist and it is known as a super app. Grab and Wechat are super apps.
A one-stop app that would seamlessly integrate the most used PE use cases to enhance student learning and improve teacher productivity would definitely qualify as a super app for PE. And I know many PE teachers that would sign up for it.
Today’s apps for PE: a fragmented landscape
For many teachers, the search for apps can be permanent, and juggling between apps is the norm. It also means the valuable student data generated across all these apps is not kept in a single place. The chances are even less that the data follows the student year on year.
A Super App for PE and its superpowers
Five superpowers
A super app for PE is a single app or platform that integrates the most used features in PE apps with selected superpowers:
Superpower 1 - top 10 PE uses cases
A super app for PE would integrate the top use cases from 3 main and overlapping areas:
- Assessments
- Event organization
- Instructional support
Assessments
We all know that assessments are an important part of the feedback loop for teachers and the students. By involving students in the assessment process, teachers can gain valuable insights into their student's progress and help them identify areas of strength and improvement.
The super app would allow teachers and students to assess based on rubrics, sports performance metrics and quizzes.
Event organization
PE teachers often have the responsibility to organize school events such as a Sports Carnival or Children’s Day. Teachers can turn to technology e.g google spreadsheets or use plain pen-and-paper to record students' scores with a labor-intensive manual tabulation at the backend. Organizing sports events or school celebrations are time-consuming tasks. Teachers may need to develop a leaderboard and point system or curate event activities.
The super app would provide key event organization features:
- Event score keeper, live activity tracker and leaderboard
- Fixture generator, score keeper and live league tables
- Amazing race designer tool (using QR and GPS)
- New fun and physically active games (example)
Instructional support
Schools currently facing a multitude of external, top-down pressures on educational attainment and health and wellbeing inequalities, there is a need for learning experiences that simultaneously improve health, wellbeing and school engagement whilst addressing curriculum needs.
The super app would enable outdoor & in-movement curriculum-based learning
Enabling connections between PE and academic subjects
Creating a stronger connection between PE and other academic subjects would greatly benefit the students. Imagine a student learning geometry, statistics, and probability concepts in the context of better understanding and improving students’ PE performances. Students would use their sports performance data collected during PE lessons with the super app’s heatmap. They would then, in a classroom setting, create insights using and learning statistical tools to analyze the distribution of their personal data.
Superpower 2 - multi-user app with a consistent user experience
Teachers and students from different classes can connect simultaneously to their own sessions. They can use their laptops, tablets or phones while enjoying a consistent user experience across all features.
The super app would be easily accessible from teachers and students
- Allow access simultaneously to any number of students and teachers from the school
- Allow access from laptops, tablets and phones
- Provide a consistent user experience across the top 10 use cases
Superpower 3 - student metrics, results, and assessments centrally stored
This key superpower is about collecting, keeping in one place and making generated data easily accessible to teachers and students.
The super app would make data easily accessible
- Keep all student-generated data across sessions and use cases
- Make the data accessible through session reports and data exports
Superpower 4 - insights and student performance reports
With insights into student performance and program effectiveness, PE teachers can use this data to make informed decisions, adjust their curriculum, and focus on areas that need improvement. It also makes active learning visible.
The super app would provide performance reports
- Provide standard student and program performance reports
- Allow teachers and students to create their own reports using the collected data during the sessions
Superpower 5 - class and student management
Teachers upload class rosters at the beginning of the school year and then assign classes to sessions. They can also group students by houses or activity groups (e.g. basketball after school).
The super app would allow
- Teachers to manage their class rosters and create student groups automatically
- Teachers to group students in houses (example)
How can we make this Super app for PE come true?
The building of these superpowers has started
Mangostin (a Singapore-based company) started to build these superpowers to create a one-stop shop PE app based on its first early adopter schools’ needs. These features are available through a teacher and a student app, along with outdoor sports timing hardware. Visiting the (example) links in the previous sections will give a sense of the current state of this potential super app for PE.
What we need
Creating the Super App for PE is a journey. It requires a community of power users to:
- Provide feedback on existing features
- Beta test new features
- Add community educational content (outdoor and in-movement)
- Share experiences with a larger community of PE teachers
- Suggest new features
Please drop us a note if you are interested in knowing more or getting involved.
herve@gomangostin.com
ho_j_yen_louis@moe.edu.sg
Contributed by
Hervé founded Mangostin Pte. Ltd. in Singapore five years ago to provide educators in South East Asia with one technology platform to run physically active sessions: Active Performance, Active Learning, and Active Fun.