The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/122355
The Press-Dispatch Getting children outside to appreciate nature How do you get children outside, instead of playing videos games and watching TV all day? Getting children away from computer and TV screens and outside into the fresh air is an increasing challenge for parents everywhere. Researchers have found that U.S. children today spend about half as much time outdoors as their counterparts did 20 years ago. Reports show that children eight to 18 spend on average more than seven and a half hours a day—or some 53+ hours per week—engaging with so-called entertainment media. One of the keys to getting kids to appreciate nature is for parents to lead by example by getting off the couch and into the outdoors themselves. Since kids love being with their parents, why not take the fun outside? For those kids who need a little extra prodding beyond following a parent's good example, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), a leading national non-profit dedicated to preserving and appreciating wildlife, offers lots of suggestions and other resources through its "Be Out There" campaign. One tip is to pack an "explorer's kit"—complete with a magnifying glass, binoculars, containers for collecting, field guides, a notebook, bug repellent and band-aids—into a backpack and leave it by the door to facilitate spontaneous outdoor adventures. Another idea is to set aside one hour each day as "green hour," during which kids go outside exploring, discovering and learning about the natural world. NWF's online Activity Finder helps parents discover fun outdoor activities segmented by age. Examples include going on a Conifer Quest and making a board displaying the different types of evergreen trees in the neighborhood, turning an old soda bottle into a terrarium and building a wildlife brush shelter. Researchers have found that children who play outside more are in better shape, more creative, less aggressive and show better concentration than their couch potato counterparts—and that the most direct route to environmental awareness for adults is participating in wild nature activities as kids. So do yourself and your kid(s) a favor, and take a hike. Wednesday, April 17, 2013 D-7 WES Spring Program Winslow Elementary fourth graders take their turn performing in the spring program. Featured singing their solo parts are Kaila Lamey, Grace Brandle and Autumn Fulps. System allows multitasking runners to read on a treadmill By Emil Venere A new innovation allows treadmill users to work their bodies and brains at the same time. The system, called ReadingMate, adjusts text on a monitor to counteract the bobbing motion of a runner's head so that the text appears still, said Ji Soo Yi, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University. "Not many people can run and read at the same time," said Yi, working with doctoral candidate Bum chul Kwon. "This is because the relative location of the eyes to the text is vigorously changing, and our eyes try to constantly adjust to such changes, which is burdensome." The small font size in text adds to the difficulty. "You could increase the font size and have a largescreen monitor on the wall, but that's impractical because you cannot have numerous big screen displays in an exercise room," Yi said. The researchers developed ReadingMate on the hypothesis that the primary impediment to reading while running is the head's vertical movement. The new system allows a treadmill user to read normalsize text on a small monitor mounted in front of the machine. Findings appear online this month in Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. The paper was authored by Kwon, Yi and Yu Zhu, an associate professor of statistics. The study included 15 students, who carried out a "letter-counting" task while running on a treadmill and using ReadingMate. The test requires participants to count how many times the letter F occurs in two lines of text situated among 10 lines displayed on a computer monitor. T he user wears goggles equipped with infrared LEDs, and an infrared cam- era captures the LEDs, tracking the runner's bobbing head. Then the text is moved in unison with the head movement, taking into consideration the human reflex to compensate for motion. "Our eyes can accommodate vibration to a certain degree," said Yi, director of Purdue's Healthcare and Information Visualization Engineering Lab, or HIVE. "There are compensatory reflex mechanisms that tend to stabilize the head and eyes to maintain gaze and head position." Kwon led work to create an algorithm to correctly move the text, accounting for this reflex. "You can't just move the text exactly in synch with the head because the eye is already doing what it can to compensate," he said. "So you have to account for that compensation by moving the text slightly out of synch with the head motion." The research showed a higher accuracy for people who used ReadingMate compared to those in a control group. " We a lso measured whether participants gave up on counting the letters because the task was too difficult," Kwon said. "We often saw people giving up without ReadingMate, especially with certain font sizes and smaller spaces between lines." The system also might be used by heavy equipment operators and aircraft pilots. "Both may experience heavy shaking and turbulence while reading information from a display," he said. "ReadingMate could stabilize the content in such cases." Zygmunt Pizlo, a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, provided critical advice during preliminary investigations, and industrial engineering student Yuming Zhang assisted post-experiment data analysis. Doctoral Student Han Wu in the Department of Statistics also was involved in the research. Music teacher Carroll Clark directs the second graders during their spring program performance. Michelle LeMond's classroom is featured playing the bells to the song "Easter Bells are Ringing." The bell ringers (l to r): Konner Simmons, Jack Tegmeyer, Lillian Thompson, Sarah Siggers, Creek Sullivan and Corey Goeppner. Kindergarteners sing "Skinnamarink," with motions, to a full house of parents and grandparents at the annual spring program at Winslow Elementary School. 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