Fbk climb: educating children not to be sedentary with the “smart walking bus”

18/07/2017 It is one of the seven good practices selected by a scientific committee, among over 400, to represent Italy at the "Transport G7" held in Cagliari July 20-21, 2017: Climb, an IoT (internet of things) system and an app that monitors and helps children reach their schools by evolving the logic of the walking bus, the "Piedibus".

The reasoning behind it is farsighted: to grow, children need to become independent, a condition that requires trusting the surrounding environment. Unfortunately, progress has caused, in many cases, a generation of children who have grown watching the world from a car seat. This, in addition to hindering their development, has a negative impact on the environment and health conditions of future generations. Something everyone should keep in mind: despite Italy being well below the OECD average for the number of obese people (1 in 10 people against an OECD average of 1 to 6), it is however one of the states in the world having more overweight children under the age of 8. The initiatives to try and reverse the trend are therefore quite urgent.

In the “CLIMB” project, technology supports independent mobility, thanks to these ingredients:

IoT solutions (acronym for “Internet of Things”) for children and Apps for volunteers in support of the walking bus, with which children walk together to school. Thanks to the mobile app, volunteers manage the walking bus more easily: organizing volunteer shifts and possible replacements and stops to be made, managing children/passengers and their daily attendance. Smart devices distributed to children identify their proximity to the volunteer, enabling automated attendance recording at different stops and making the compilation of the “on board log” automatic.

A game (Kids go green) that motivates them to reach the school through sustainable means, in which the kilometers actually traveled correspond to a virtual trip aeound the world. The game promotes sustainable and active mobility of children through persuasive gamification technology. Summing up all sustainable kilometers (walking, cycling, school bus) made daily by children, teachers and volunteers, schools advance on a journey into the real world. Progress and reached legs are displayed on an interactive multimedia map. Each class, based on their curriculum, can add study material to certain legs.

CLIMB is a community initiative (children, families, school), created thanks to the collaboration between the Municipality of Trento and Fondazione Bruno Kessler. To date, it has involved two schools in the area, over 100 children and 45 volunteers.