Towards a Safe Aquatic Literacy: teaching the breaststroke swimming with mobile devices' support. A preliminary study

Abstract

Problem Statement: Technical swimming skills, the breaststroke in particular, are basic for a safe aquatic literacy and drowning prevention. Learn-to-swim programs cope to several teaching constraints, including providing adequate feedbacks to the learner to guarantee the best motor control and skills’ acquisition. Recent technology makes mobile devices user-friendly and suitable in providing video feedbacks to the athletes or to the learners during coaching or teaching physical education and sports, even in particular environments, such as swimming pools. Approach: In this study, we supported a breaststroke learn-to-swim program with video feedbacks by mobile devices (MDS) and we compared the outcomes to a program in which the teacher used conventional feedbacks, comments and corrections, only provided by gesture and verbal communication (C). Sixteen young participants (20.60.5 years) were assigned to MDS or C. Before and after the 8-weeks learning program, the breaststroke skills of the participants were evaluated by both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Purpose: The study aimed to assess whether augmented feedbacks improved the learning of breaststroke skills more than the standard approach commonly used in swimming schools. Results: MDS and C resulted comparable, as no interaction was retrieved from the Mixed-model analysis of variance. However, the qualitative analysis revealed that MDS improved in a higher number of features among those observed. Conclusions: The results seem to indicate that learn-to-swim programs with augmented feedbacks, as by mobile devices, might be beneficial to the learners and recommended to the teachers.