Students as Partners in Addressing the Needs of the School Community: A Case Study From Post-Pandemic Physical Education and Sports Science in Singapore

Abstract: This paper describes the processes of conceptualization, design, and iteration of a project-in-progress, in which a team of high school students in Singapore applied themselves to the development of a mobile application in response to expressions of need from Physical Education and Sports Science teachers. We used the Neutral Ordinary Differential Equation (NeuralODE) technique, operated on a Heading Agnostic Coordinate Frame and applied back-propagation on velocity loss to improve the effectiveness of our model. We then predicted motion trajectories from raw Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Benchmarking against other State-Of-The-Art shows a reduction of parameter count by seven times while achieving an average trajectory error of four meters. The application has teacher-administrator and student modes, and is designed to assist teachers during the preparation for – and conduct of – an annual mandatory physical fitness test for students, namely running a distance of 2.4 kilometres. As Singapore is a city-state with a territorial area of only 735 square kilometres and a population of six million, the very high population density of 7800 persons per square kilometre means that the land area of each school campus across the island is necessarily limited. Schools are built as multi-storey structures and few school campuses have the luxury of their own running track. Further, Singapore’s position just one degree north of the equator means that annual precipitation is high (2100 millimetres per year) and relatively uniform across each month. Taken together, these factors mean that students practising for the 2.4 kilometre run are not able to run a geometrically symmetric route, and are sometimes out of sight from teachers within or around buildings and other sheltered spaces. Traditionally, this has meant that there is margin for error in the estimation of distance run by each student. Accurate indoor positioning remains a significant challenge due to poor permeability of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals within buildings, rendering traditional methods ineffective. In April 2024, teachers from a secondary school approached the authorial team to discuss the preceding problem and to understand the affordances and disaffordances of potential mediatory approaches. The paper documents the process of consultation, conceptualization, design, development and iteration primarily from the students’ perspective, with a view to exploring the extent to which the student bodies of other schools might potentially be engaged as partners in developing solutions to problems faced by schools in general.

Keywords: Auto-ethnography, Educational technology, Mobile application development, Participatory models in education, Sport/science teacher education in Singapore, Teacher-student partnership

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007200

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