Form 6 took part in a cross-curricular maths and sports project where they participated in various different fitness exercises and used the statistics gathered to analyse the results. They found out that fitness can be broken down into different components. Health-related fitness includes strength, muscular endurance, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility and body composition. Skill-related components include agility, coordination, reaction time, balance, power and speed. The children looked at predictions using hypotheses and focused on the relationship between cardiovascular endurance and lung capacity, height and agility, and the comparison between height and jumping distance. All the fitness tests provided data which could be compared to normative scores. These normative scores are indicators of how the participant has performed in comparison to the general population.
The children took part in a variety of fitness tests including the Illinois Agility Test which comprises a weaving running course, marked out by cones, which had to be completed in the shortest possible time; the National Multi-Stage Fitness Test which involves continuous running between two lines 20m apart in time to recorded beeps. The speed at the start is quite slow and, after a minute the speed steadily increases and the beeps get closer together. Another test involved the Standing Broad Jump where, from a two foot standing start, the children leapt as far forward as possible, repeating the test several times to record the best distance.
A common method of testing lung capacity is to use the Peak Flow Meter but the pupils used balloons to calculate their lung capacity by measuring the circumference after one maximum exhalation. From the circumference, they calculated the radius and then substituted this into the formula for the volume of a sphere. The next step involved the children plotting the data they had collected from all four tests on scatter graphs and making conclusions based on the correlations they found. One pupil remarked, "Some of the tests involved as much mental stamina as they did physical but they were all interesting to analyse in terms of our aerobic fitness, strength and endurance. It was a positive way to help us set our own health-related fitness goals and to use our maths skills at the same time to predict and then discuss the results."
