Rob Stiles of Engage Sport North depicted as a 2D character. (Engage Sport North, YouTube)

By Ethan Ready

Elementary Fitness

Engage Sport North launches active resources for students and teachers

Apr 15, 2020 | 3:53 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – As part of Engage Sport North’s work to create resources for students and teachers in School District 57, Rob Stiles has been busy creating small movement challenges that can be shared out and about to everyone.

This comes in response to schools being closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing students to partake in at-home education through e-Learning.

“The School District did come to Engage Sport and asked if we could help, especially with the elementary kids and making sure they had something, the teachers had something to work with.”

The idea is to spread very short, fun movement activities built around fundamental movement skills for people to do that can earn points for them as individuals or as part of teams they create that will be reflected on a leaderboard.

The short challenge videos depict Stiles as an animated 2D avatar, joking in the first introductory video that he’s worked out so hard that he’s lost an entire dimension.

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The goal of Engage Sport was to also make their videos as inclusive as possible, while also ensuring anyone could do them regardless of whether they’re elementary school students or older, as well as taking in consideration their access to equipment.

“We don’t know what people have got. So it had to be something that everybody has, so very little equipment or something that you can just grab that they’ll probably have in their house,” said Stiles. “We wanted it to be very fun and very simple. A couple of minutes of movement is better than nothing.”

Quite simply, Stiles says the best way to keep active is to be creative in the method of doing so.

“We all know that we should be moving more. We should all be up and about, but we can be creative in doing that. Once you start getting into that idea of adapting and being fun with it, you can make really simple jobs a lot of fun and get some exercise out of it.”

The first introductory video can be found on Engage Sport North Society’s Youtube channel, with new videos being posted each week for its challenges.