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'Wii workout' for overweight pupils plan slammed

Wii shall not be moved

Any students hoping to go for a Wii during lesson time will have to hold it for now. A campaign group claims that a scheme suggested by the UK Department of Health (DoH) to introduce the console into classrooms is simply a gimmick.

The DoH is backing the trial introduction of Wiis into four Worcestershire high schools, in a bid to get kids, who may have otherwise bunked off PE lessons, active and burning off their school dinners.

However, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, Nick Seaton, this weekend dismissed the project. “It looks like a gimmick," he told the Press Association. "It’s pandering to the views of the physically idle.”

Seaton said that kids would be better off doing serious competitive sports and games. So he’s clearly never played a heart-pounding tennis set on Wii Sports.

The good news for Seaton is that a recent study among the allegedly laziest people on earth, university students, has found that although the Wii is good for getting people off the sofa and moving around, it’s not the best way of getting a good cardiovascular workout.

Seaton’s comments won't signal the removal of Wiis from the classroom though. A DoH spokesman said that the UK government welcomes the positive impact of innovations like this.

Latest Comments

Reminds me of this...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13

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@Martin Owens

Actually I think there is far too much focus on diet and not enough on excercise. If you think 50 year s ago people were eating bread and dripping (carbohydrate soaked in a pool of fat) but instead of sitting around each evening and not using that energy where as in the past bordem would cause more actvity outside.

However I do think wii would be good to get people started and perhaps setting PE by ability to remove the uber competive to make it more "fun"

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Lessons are not supposed to be enjoyed, they're supposed to improve you

If you're thick, you still have to do Maths. If you have the manual dexterity of a hippo in high heels, you still have to do Art. If you're fat, you still have to do PE. You never know, you might actually become slightly less stupid, slightly more dextrous, slightly less overweight, as a result of the lessons. You certainly won't if you skip them and go off to play Wii courtesy of some stupid government Pork 2.0 project. Forcing children to do things in order to improve themselves and their future prospects is called educashun, stoopid.

I can't believe the number of people who are acting like playing Wii is actually a decent workout. Last week not only did a study prove that it isn't, but commenters then greeted it with "Thanks, Professor Obvious of the Department of Obvious Studies at the University Of Duh." But tell them that they can save kids from the horrors of PE - even if it means ending up with yet more cottonwooled kidults who sue when they walk into someone round a corner because they've not been allowed to have any experience of human confrontation - and inconvenient things like facts are forgotten.

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Campaign for Real Education

Aren't these the lot who've complained every education act since the mid 19th Century has been a regressive step that will only hasten the end of Empire and a lack of respect for the Empress of India?

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@Tim

Nah, the tennis is a piece of cake to play with simply wrist flicks...nowt to do with massive movement (same goes for the ten pin bowling). That said, when I've played the boxing game, I end up sweating more than a naughty person on a rape charge! I lead a relatively active life chasing my fourteen month old son around my house stopping him from destroying it brick by brick too! :D

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