Health Quests

Overview
In the activity, students visit Web sites that provide information about the skills and tasks of the sports medicine professional, as well as requirements for a career in this field. One of the sites offers a glimpse of team sports medicine professionals at work, detailing the kinds of knowledge such practitioners are required to have and the questions they may be asked to answer. Using this and other information, students then complete a career checklist.

Objectives

• To assemble a profile of the sports medicine profession by combining information provided at several different sites on the World Wide Web.
• To demonstrate an ability to extrapolate from and compile information derived from different sources.

Getting Started
Provide groups of students with clippings from newspapers or sports magazines about players in professional sports who have sustained injuries and are currently on the disabled list. Ask groups to inspect the clippings for possible generalizations about the type and nature of injuries associated with contact sports. Ask: Is it possible to be injured before a game even begins, and if so, how? Elicit that athletes who fail to take proper training provisions, including pregame warm-ups, are susceptible to injury. Note that in the activity, students learn about a career area whose goal is to help prevent such injuries--not only among athletes but also among all physically active people--and to treat such injuries when they arise.

Classroom Follow-up
Invite students to compare and contrast their career checklists, noting interesting or useful facts they may have missed in their own research. Students interested in taking the project a step further might be encouraged to interview a sports medicine practitioner for his or her personal view on working in this profession. If students have access to a video or digital camera and the classroom computer is equipped with a video capture card, students may consider creating a multimedia report that contains the text of the interview along with video stills of useful exercises the professional might demonstrate to limit injury.