At
one point in his college years, Jeffrey Byrd didn't know whether his calling in
life was to be a health professional or a computer nerd. Luckily, he found a
job where he was able to be both of these things at West Virginia University's WellWVU.
A student worker job he picked up over the summer offered him the chance to
incorporate both passions together to create the WELLGO Calendar, an online
program that teaches students how to integrate healthy lifestyle habits into
their weekly schedules to avoid unnecessary stress.
Byrd, a senior computer science major from Las Vegas, Nev., said the project
began as a group assignment for a game development class he took last spring
semester. WELLGO Calendar is a game created by WELLWVU's Office of Wellness
& Health Promotion and administered in person to students during wellness
programming. Wanting to broaden the reach of the program, Colleen Harshbarger,
director of the Office of Wellness and Health Promotion, presented the game to Dr.
Frances VanScoy's computer gaming class.
By the end of the semester, Harshbarger wanted to hire the group as summer
student workers to fully create the program. As Byrd was the only student
available to accept the position, he worked on it all summer by himself under
her direction.
"I originally started out as a psychology major, but when I went into computer
science I decided I wanted to write software that plays the role of health
professionals or helps with health issues, so this was right up my alley," Byrd
said. "I loved it, it was pretty much the first job I ever had and I got to do
something I'm passionate about."
"Overall, this was a great summer project for me. I learned a whole lot about
building websites, how to host applications on servers and different
programming languages. I taught myself a lot."
The program encompasses all aspects of what a typical student's week would
include in categories such as eating, going to class, studying,
work/volunteering, exercising, socializing, drinking, sleeping, spiritual
practice and miscellaneous. Each category has a different colored block that
students drag into the provided spreadsheet to make up a hypothetical schedule
for the upcoming week.
Once the schedule is built and the student hits the "analyze" button, the
program will provide feedback, Byrd said.
"It is built to analyze such factors as not getting enough sleep, alerting the
student that skipping breakfast is a health risk and commending them for things
such as balancing social life with study time", he said. "Students can
then go back in and modify the blocks to fix the health risks. Once they're
done, they have a good hypothetical schedule to go off of for the week and can
save the stress of worrying about what's coming up."
Harshbarger said WELLWVU has used the game for the past two years as a part of
its chillWELL program, and wanted a way to bring it to more students with an
online interactive format.
"The main point of the program is to provide students with a tool to improve
time management skills and to help them understand how organizing their time
can improve efficiency and actually give them more time to do the things they
love," Harshbarger said. "Students can learn how some choices they make
throughout the week contribute to or detract from optimum performance, such as
yo-yo sleep patterns decreasing cognitive function and alertness, and other
factors."
Harshbarger said students identify stress and lack of sleep as the top two
impediments to academic success, and the program will help to encourage
students to plan and lead a balanced, healthy life.
"Based on the theory of planned behavior, students who create a realistic plan
for success and optimal performance are more likely to achieve it. WELLgo
Calendar will help students learn which behaviors contribute to stress, and
which foster well-being. A healthy balance of social time, study time, and
healthy lifestyle behaviors is the key to student success in college. The
calendar helps students learn how to establish that balance," she said.
The office of WELLWVU encourages all students to try the program, whether they
are new this semester or working on a doctorate degree. The program has the
ability to export the student's finished product into a Google Calendar once
completed, and future plans for the project are to integrate it with the
student's inidividual MyID logins.
To make a WELLGO Calendar, visit http://well.wvu.edu
and click on the link at the bottom of the page.
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