Development of activity promoting open space
City Challenge: "Kreuz und Quer" (K&Q)
The “Kreuz & Quer” campaign is intended to reach children and young people in particular and encourage them to move around more in their own living environment and thus explore their surroundings. With the help of sophisticated technologies and the principle of gamification, we want to achieve these goals.
Core Objectives
- Getting children, adolescents and also adults to be more active in their local community: K&Q is a competition-based running game in residential areas where teams (e.g. school classes) try to collect as many points as possible. The collection of points is done by the children holding their chip cards with RFID-chips at boxes distributed in the neighborhood. They are credited with certain points and an algorithm can calculate and sum up the distance they are likely to cover
- Gain insights into how structural aspects in urban space can contribute to more movement or how they prevent it by looking at heat-maps (application in urban planning)
- Scientific starting points are to be gained via the underlying psychological mechanisms and motivational aspects
Measures, Methods & Approaches
- existing (game) system of an external company is used
- recruitment and organization are carried out by the City of Munich
- evaluation of the results: Several tested, valid and reliable instruments (questionnaires), movement data and scores (recorded by chip cards, boxes, and digital backend), further information from the participants such as age, school, feeling of safety on the way to school, preferred form of transport to school
Opportunities & Challenges
- large potential target group: City of Munich as the organizer has access to the registration data and contact information of schools schools and can therefore reach potentially (almost) all children of the respective district. The adult relatives of the children are also allowed to participate in the intervention. Participants are reached in their natural living environment, not in a constructed setting.
- various age groups
- theoretical applicability to countless cities
- financing of equipment needs to be ensured
Lessons learnt
- the correct technological support must be verified: does the technology work as expected or does this possibly lead to problems in the evaluation of the data or restrictions in the fun of playing? (repeated checking of the equipment is necessary)
- cooperation with supposedly heavy-handed local or national institutions can be very fruitful and beneficial
Recommendations to the world
With a competition-based game involving a large number of people, it is possible to encourage them to engage in low-threshold physical activity directly in their local environment. This can also help residents to get to know their own neighborhood better and to draw conclusions for health-oriented urban planning from their movement patterns.
Need more information?
If you are interested in this topic in general or the project in particular, please feel free to contact us or to inform yourself about Kreuz & Quer.
Experimental Scenarios
