Development, Feasibility, and Acceptability of Aim to Play, a User-Friendly Digital Application for Teacher Skills Training and Physical EducationActivities for 3-5 Grade Elementary Students

ABSTRACT Childhood physical inactivity is associated with a myriad of preventable health inequities among children, including greater prevalence and more severe childhood obesity, poorer cardiovascular and bone health and lower levels of cognitive functioning, mental health, and self-esteem. Children from low-income, minority, and rural backgrounds are particularly vulnerable for not meeting recommended levels of health-enhancing physical activity (PA) and rely more heavily on schools to obtain quality PA opportunities than other children. While 43 states currently have laws mandating elementary school physical education (PE) to promote student public health objectives, most students do not achieve adequate PE participation because teachers (both PE certified and regular classroom teachers or paraprofessionals who teach PE) have limited or no access to easy-to-use and low-cost programmatic resources that address salient barriers for conducting effective, evidence-based, and standards-based PE. The Pocket PE 3-5™ digital app (initially conceptualized as Aim to Play 3-5TM) developed and piloted in our SBIR Phase I project, is designed for 3rd - 5th grade teachers and students and works across common platforms and devices, online and offline, and provides simple, easy to use, standards-based PE lesson activities tailored by time, instructional setting (classroom, gym, outside), grade, student skill level, and equipment resources. The app is low-cost and includes brief teacher skill demonstration videos for each activity, along with printable activity cards, music, and audio cues to signal transitions to assist teachers and students with class management in ‘real time’ during PE. The program also includes embedded data tracking of PE minutes and completed instructional standards to assist with district and/or state mandated reporting. Pocket PE 3-5 offers a technology-driven solution to promote the adoption of Comprehensive School Physical Activity Programs (CSPAPs) by providing a scalable, evidence-based resource to underserved schools to promote high-quality physical education (PE) participation among students. Within Phase I, we showed that the Pocket PE 3-5 prototype met all benchmarks for program usability, acceptability, user satisfaction, consumer satisfaction, and fidelity of implementation. During Phase II, we plan to (1) complete the final development of the Pocket PE 3-5 digital app using an iterative development process with national experts, including the creation of 256 standards-based PE activities and associated demonstration videos and enhanced app functionality for curriculum planning, and (2) conduct a clustered randomized trial with 24 elementary schools involving 72 classroom teachers and their students to evaluate the effectiveness of the Pocket PE 3-5 program for improving classroom teacher PE self-efficacy and evidence-based PE instructional best practices, and student moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) participation in PE and PE enjoyment, and demonstrate program feasibility. At the end of the Phase II project Pocket PE 3-5 will be ready for national distribution. Wide-spread implementation from effective marketing will have a large impact on public health by addressing a prevalent need to support classroom teachers in PE instruction.