This is great. I'm all for this. However, a more effective strategy for combating childhood obesity would be to change the price of school lunches so that a fruit salad is cheaper than a pizza. Seriously, at my high school, I could get a huge pizza for $5 and giant chocolate cookies for 50 cents a piece, but a fruit salad or pasta was like $7. It's a serious problem I'm surprised hasn't been corrected yet.

Now something that you can do in school that gets you on your feet instead of doing a crapload of class work.

Math with dancing!

sure if this came to my school i would try it.

I wish more parents actually tried to combat this in their kids

OH ****

best way to combat childhood obesity is with a chainsaw.

I knew DDR could be a good work out , but I would never think that it would be a big awesome armature dance party. Just think how stinky the classroom would be.

This is awesome. I wish my childhood had this. And just think, the computer already comes with a grading system.

yeah! i think its kind of cool that schools are implementing a nice twist to p.e like a cool game of DDR to break up the predictability of the same routine , this way it becomes more interactive and fun where there could be teams , one on one , two on two and so on and at the same time learn some nice dance steps hahhahahaha......... but all in all its a great idea to me

thank god! this continant is full of fat kids with idiotic parents telling them to love themselves just how unhealthy they are...go konami!!

Yes!  An excuse to play a game in school!  Thank you konami

This is cool, it's a good way to get kids active, and it'll likely keep them interested. I wonder what age groups they're targeting. Hopefully younger ones, that will get into this more. Not that DDR isn't fun to older kids, but I can bet you probably won't be getting a whole lot of people up in front of the class having a dance off.

A few things: 1) Why does california need this? LA, at least, is pretty damn warm, and I've heard that sports are very popular there. I don't know where CA is on the nationwide obesity chart, but I imagine it's doing pretty well. 2) The mats for DDR will add up in cost. Even if they're used responsibly (i.e. players learn to step lightly rather than slamming down on them and take off their shoes before playing), they wear out. The default mats are typically $30 and not worth using at all. The $100 ones wear out after a year. The $500-700 ones are supposed to last, but that's no small cost. Otherwise, it really is pretty good for aerobic activity. I was in much better shape when I was playing this for 10-60 minutes daily. Try the 9-star difficulty tracks, and you'll be sweating after 2 minutes if not winded.

This is a great idea but this isn't really all that new. In the highschool I attended it had a PS2 with a good dancepad not the cheap vinyl ones but after playing it everyday for an entire semester I could play from beginner all the way to standard.

I like this idea and if its successful then great. Let's see what happens with the results.

I wish they did this when i was in high school. Maybe my college classes will get this. I'm really glad they're deciding to do something for today's obesity. It's getting out of hand.

Wow, that's pretty cool to hear about. Especially impressive that they're allowing 48 player participation in the game, curious as to how that will turn out. While I don't think it's as widespread a problem as it's sometimes made out to be - Many people join athletics or are required to be in PE - it is still good to be supporting such measure to counteract obesity, and I'm all for it!

That is really cool; time for those kids to lose some weight. They should get that over here where I live; we got some majorly fat kids...I feel sorry for them. I wish their parents cared enough about them to make them eat healthier, but that's just my opinion.

48 pads, eh? Now that, I'd like to see.

But something else bothers me a bit: if this is for the PC, how do they expect all 48 of those kids to be able to see the screen (provided that 48 kids are playing, of course)? Most computer monitors aren't nearly big enough for that kind of thing. The most reasonable choice of action would be to implement a projection screen, but with all of this extra hardware/software, it seems like this is going to cost quite a bit, and that would cause schools to be less likely to approve of it. Sad, indeed...