What she saw in Finland was especially “eye opening” — a recognition of the value of play in a child’s educational journey. The schools she visited enjoyed a 15-minute break for exercise or physical play for every 45 minutes of instruction time.

“I thought, how can I replicate that here? We don’t do enough of it.”

“We’ve really worked hard, especially at the K-5 level, to bring kids outdoors as much as possible,” said Sinha, who in years past has directed funding to develop multiple outdoor classroom spaces across the district’s five elementary school buildings. Educators are encouraged to incorporate movement breaks into snacktime, and they recently fenced the schoolyard around the middle school so that older students can enjoy a recess and be more active.

But when it comes to boosting physical activity, any significant alteration to the daily schedule comes with a cost: precious lost minutes required for core academic classes. 

“I do think if kids had that extra physical activity, we’d need to teach less,” Sinha said. “It’s weird to say, but I think they retain more when they have more opportunities to be active.”

She’s not wrong.

New from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, shows that when students engage in high-intensity interval exercises, they score significantly higher on standardized tests measuring verbal comprehension. In a study of elementary school children aged 9 to 12, researchers examined a type of brain neuroelectrical activity called “error-related negativity,” which occurs when people make a mistake and is associated with reduced focus and performance. What they found is that after acute exercise, the error-related activity decreased significantly.

“We have to be aware of our child’s health, and if we want them to succeed academically and mental health-wise, exercise is something that needs to be in the forefront,” says Eric Drollette, the study’s lead author and a professor at UNC. “Yes, it helps with their physical health, but we can’t forget the brain part of it. The benefits of exercise can be influential in an [educational] environment .”

Drollette had a pretty good idea that the experiment would reveal some type of positive relationship between exercise and academics. After all, research has long borne out the benefits of physical exercise on the mental health and general wellness of adults and children alike. One of Drollette’s own previous involving college students who underwent high-intensity interval training showed improved brain function and cognition. 

But having three children of his own, he knew anecdotally that any type of prolonged high-intensity activity, like running on a treadmill or using other types of exercise equipment, just wasn’t feasible for younger children. Not only, he suspected, would they get bored or lack motivation to complete the exercise, but it also wasn’t a scenario that educators could easily replicate in their own classrooms. 

The goal instead was to design a fitness regimen that would hold student interest and could be performed in the classroom without taking up too much time. What he came up with was a series of stationary exercises – think high knees, jumping jacks, lunges and squats — performed one after another, alternating between 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off for nine minutes total. 

“This is more natural for a kid’s type of exercise,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that if a teacher reads this, or if the public reads this, they can say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s something that’s possible to do in the classroom.’”

What ended up surprising Drollette, he said, was how selective the benefits were for certain academic achievements — most notably, for word recognition and fluency, which include reading and word processing — and much less for math. Another surprising result? The children didn’t realize they were exercising as hard as they actually were, suggesting, Drollette said, that they truly enjoyed the movement break.

The study comes against the backdrop of schools recess and physical education classes in order to prioritize instructional time and boost academic achievement — especially in the wake of the pandemic, which wrought steep learning loss. According to the , children should get four 15-minute recesses every day. While more than of the country’s elementary schools incorporate regularly scheduled recess into each school day, on average students receive just 27 minutes. 

As it stands, only require schools to offer a daily recess, and most districts don’t have a formal recess policy. Since the mid-2000s, up to 40 percent of school districts have reduced or cut recess. Moreover, some districts still allow educators to take away recess as a punishment, which experts say does more harm than good.

While Drollette acknowledges that the main focus of schools is academics — not movement — the practice of shortening recess and physical education, he says, is short sighted. 

“As a nation, we’ve really struggled to recover loss in physical activity since the pandemic,” he says. “If we keep removing physical activity, we may be hampering mental health as well as cognitive function. And then if kids are performing poorly cognitively, they’re not doing well with academics, causing schools to keep pushing academics. And so my approach is that we may need to flip the other direction. We need to focus on physical movement for a better healthy mind in order for kids to do well in school.”

This summer, the Trump administration appeared to recognize as much, issuing an establishing a President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, as well as reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test — the latter of which harkens back to back to the 1950s under President Dwight D. Eisenhower but was phased out in 2013.

“For far too long, the physical and mental health of the American people has been neglected.  Rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels, particularly among our children,” the order reads. “These trends weaken our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale.”

It’s unclear what the new regimen will look like, but the original test required students to compete in their schools and nationally by completing circuits of pushups, pullups, situps and the mile run, among other exercises. Notably, the test was retired under the Obama administration in exchange for the “Presidential Youth Fitness Program,” which focused more holistically on student health and less on the competitive test.

Starting this school year, one thing is certain: School district leaders like Sinha and classroom educators will continue to be hard-pressed to inject more time for physical activity into the day due to time requirements for core academic subjects.

“Physical activity is more important than ever before for our students,” she says, noting that students in Finland traditionally score at the top on the international benchmark assessments known as — far above students in the U.S. “It’s always been important, but kids are different today, and they need to be moving their little bodies around.”

Historic Foust Elementary School has had a game changing start to the year. School and district leaders, parents, and community members were eager to get inside one of Greensboro’s newest elementary schools for their ribbon cutting ceremony on Feb. 3, 2025 to witness an innovative progression in the school’s history. They were greeted by students and the school’s robotic dog, Astro.

Foust Elementary School, part of (GCS), is the country’s first public gaming and robotics elementary school, according to the district. The school still sits on its original land, but the building has been rebuilt from the ground up. They began welcoming students into the new building at the start of 2025.

Foust Elementary School’s history goes all the way back to the 1960s. Foust student Nyla Parker read the following account at the ribbon cutting ceremony:

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

“Since its construction in 1965, Julius I Foust Elementary School has prided itself in serving the students and families of its community, with the goal of creating citizens who will leave this place with high character and academic excellence. … Now, almost 60 years later, we welcome you to the new chapter of Foust Gaming and Robotics Elementary School. As a student here at Foust, I am excited about various opportunities that will be offered to me as I learn more about exciting industries such as gaming, robotics, coding, and 2D plus 3D animation. Thank you to the voters of our community for saying yes to the 2020 bond that allowed this place to become a reality for me and my fellow classmates. Game on!”

Foust is a Title I school in a historically underinvested part of Guilford County. Several years ago, the district conducted a master facility study, which resulted in Foust getting on the list to receive an entirely new building.

“Foust was one of the oldest buildings in the district and it was literally falling apart, so we were on the list to have a total new construction,” said Kendrick Alston, principal of Foust.

“During that time, we also talked with the district and really thought about, well, building a new school. What can we also do differently in terms of teaching and learning, instead of just building a new building?”

The mission of Foust is to “envision a future where students are equipped with the skills, knowledge, and tools to lead the new global economy,” according to . The new global economy, featuring high projected growth in , was a driving factor for planners as they decided to focus the school on gaming and robotics.

There are many jobs that can come from learning the skills necessary to build video games and robots. Looking at recent labor market trends, many of those jobs are growing. Web developers and digital designers have an 8% projected growth rate from 2023-2033 with a median pay of $92,750 per year, according to the .

“We looked at a lot of studies, we looked at research, and one of the things that we looked at was something from the World Economic Forum that looked at the annual jobs report. We saw that STEM, engineering, those kinds of jobs, were some of the top fastest growing jobs across the world,” said Alston. “When we think about school looking different for our students and being engaging, well, let’s make it something that’s relevant to them but is also giving them a skill set that they can be marketable in the global workforce as well.”

The team at Foust, including teachers and staff, have spent several months in specialized training on a new and unique curriculum designed to help prepare students for the ever evolving world of work. The building, designed to bring 21st century learning to life, is part of the first phase of schools constructed from .

“I am excited for what this new space is going to produce,” said Hope Purcell, a teacher at Foust. “With the continued support from our robotics curriculum, students will have the opportunity to tap into a new world of discovery that will prepare them for the future.”

Many community and education leaders were present at the ribbon cutting, including several county commissioners and Guilford superintendent Whitney Oakley. Oakley shared excitement about the new school and reminded everyone that the leaders who came before her who advocated for the passing of the bond and were open to the vision of a school like Foust were a huge part of making this new school a reality.

“Today is not just about celebrating a building,” Oakley said. “It’s about celebrating what this building really represents, and that’s opportunity and access to the tools of modern K-12 education. It represents the culmination of years of planning and conversation and design to make sure that we can build a space that serves families and students for decades to come. The joy on the faces of the staff and the families and the students is just a reminder that teaching and learning is more effective when everybody has the resources that they need to thrive, and that should not be the exception, that should be the rule.”

Students sometimes need different levels of support and resources in order to thrive. Foust hopes to be a place where all students can succeed. Another school district in New Jersey, the , is using gaming and technology to engage students with cognitive and behavioral differences. They have designed specifically for students with cognitive challenges, like Autism Spectrum Disorder. This is just one example of how gaming can create an inclusive learning environment.

As Foust settles into its brand new building, they are already planning for new opportunities ahead, including partnerships with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University for innovative programming for students and parents.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.