Fight For Your Right To Recess

My name is Cantor Soule-Reeves. I like in Portland Oregon and I go to Richmond Elementary School. We get 20 minutes of recess there and if it’s raining outsider my teacher don’t let us go outside.

And we get a lot of rain in Portland, 164 days a year on average.

Of course it does! It’s recess, your just playing with toys. Of course you can’t run in the classroom and if you don’t run it just doesn’t count as recess.

So this is the question that we wanted to answer and you know does staying in make Cantor more active, can we show it. So we got him a Fitbit to track his steps with and we you know wanted to take a look at steps on days when they cancel recess and on days when he gets to have recess.

Unfortunately we didn’t keep track of you know, real time of which days recess was cancelled at school. So I went after the fact and pulled weather data from the Dark Sky API about which days were raining like during recess time from his school. You can give them a lat/long, and a time of day and they’ll give you historical data about that.

So Cantor has been really excited about the Fitbit, really into tracking his steps. So you know first here is just a look at his step data. We got him the Fitbit in March. He averages 15,000 steps a day and I broke this down and I guess I didn’t pick very good colors. There’s a really light yellow bar that’s his actual all day total, and then the dark yellow bar and the green bar are his school day totals and his just recess time, the 20 minutes that he’s at recess.

And again here’s a look at the cumulative total. He’s almost to one and a half million steps cumulatively since March.

And then so here’s the analysis. We graphed the steps on days when it was raining. He averages 630 steps during that just the 20 minutes of recess there, and on days when it’s dry or only drizzling because when there’s a little bit of rain they do get to go outside, he gets twice as many steps, so there we go.

And Cantor is definitely excited to keep tracking steps with his Fitbit and going forward from here. But we’re hoping to take this information to the school and see if we can change policy for us.

And that’s where you can find Cantor online there. He’s also been working on a website, so there we go.