Updated: SPEA Newsletter 2024 Issue No. 1 (June/July)

Singapore Physical Education Association

A Super App for PE Teachers

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, delivering your items, 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 seamlessly integrates the most used PE use cases to enhance student learning and improve teacher productivity would 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

As a PE teacher, you may have 10 to 15 apps on your phone or tablet, most of which you use occasionally. Also, you probably downloaded many more apps to explore or for a one-off use.

For many teachers, searching for apps can be permanent, and juggling between apps is the norm.

Most of these apps are free and single-purpose; some have a very appealing user interface, some are not maintained after a few years, some allow you to collect and report on metrics, few attach these metrics to actual students, and most don’t keep your data beyond the end of the session. It also means the valuable student data generated across all these apps is not kept in a single place.

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 following use cases from 3 main and overlapping areas:

Assessments
Event organization
Instructional support

Superpower 1 - Top use cases - 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.

NAPFA test (example)
Time tracking and pacing self-assessment (example)
Sport performance metrics
Heatmap
Self, peer and teacher assessments using rubrics (example)
Quiz and quiz in movement (example)

Superpower 1 - Top use cases - 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:

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)

Superpower 1 - Top use cases - 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

Navigation, orienteering & treasure hunts (example)
Amazing learning race (example)
Active recess (example)
Adding movement to teaching materials (example)

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

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

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.

The super app would

Provide standard student and program performance report
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.

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 (or potential superpowers) are available through a teacher and a student app, along with outdoor sports timing hardware.

Visiting the 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.

Article 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: Sports Timing, Active Learning, and Active Fun.