Creativity in Recreational Figure Roller-Skating: A Pilot Study on the Psychological Benefits in School-Age Girls.

Creative strategies allow students to feel ownership of their learning, fostering interest and motivation towards sports and educational contexts. This study aimed to compare different psychological variables after applying creative and traditional sessions of recreational figure roller-skating. Twelve school-age female skaters (9.00 ± 1.09 years old) participated in this pilot study. They performed two sessions: (1) a creative session (where participants created their own choreography) and (2) a traditional session (where participants followed the choreography created by the sports professional). In the creative session, participants created their choreographies without instructions. The basic psychological needs scale, the measure of intentionality to be physically active (sports adherence) and the games and emotions scale were administered after each session. The creative intervention led to a higher satisfaction of the needs of perceived competence (p-value = 0.04; effect size = 0.59), social relationships (p-value = 0.03; effect size = 0.62) and adherence to figure roller-skating (p-value = 0.02; effect size = 0.69), compared to the traditional intervention in female skaters. Participants showed significantly more humor and less surprise in the creative session than in the traditional session. This greater satisfaction with perceived competence and social relationships could translate into greater adherence to sports.

Game Space and Game Situation as Mediators of the External Load in the Tasks of School Handball.

The teacher's didactic intervention also requires knowledge and control of learning tasks' workloads. The objectives of the study were as follows: (i) to quantify the subjective external load-eTL of tasks framed in didactic units designed by in-service teachers; and (ii) to analyze the differences in the subjective eTL according to the game situation and the game space. A total of 306 learning tasks designed by seven in-service teachers (five men and two women), with more than 10 years of teaching practice, were analyzed. These tasks were coded through the Integral System for Training Task Analysis (SIATE, acronym in Spanish). The interobserver reliability of the coded variables obtained a considerable concordance (MKfree > 0.70). The results indicated that there were significant differences in the subjective eTL according to the game situation and game space. The situations of small-sided games in numerical equality or inequality and full games, in medium spaces or large spaces, presented a higher subjective eTL and therefore the highest physiological and motor demands on students. The inclusion of attacking or defending players and an adequate selection of the game space indicated the importance of planning and organizing learning tasks.