Cardiac Curricular Exercise

Physiology teaching resources have been adjusted to include innovative pedagogical approaches into classes that meet the learning expectation of the future generation of students, such as pleasure while learning, contextualization of the content, activities targeting personalized learning and use of information technologies. Attempting to develop a practical lesson protocol to introduce basics concepts of cardiac rhythms, and simultaneously to present the smartphones applications as a reliable tool for data collecting, we created a protocol that interchanges walking and dancing phases with heart rate measurements. By following an instructional video, the protocol engages the students in dancing in the rhythm of classical, pop and samba music and monitoring their cardiac frequency. Students collected their own data using the app Instant Heart Rate (Azumio®) and expressed the results in graphics based on the discussion about scientific methodology and limitation of the protocol. The cardiac rhythm dance protocol allowed students to observe that cardiac cycle-like movements paced by the classical song induced a significant reduction of heart rate and samba rhythm significantly increased it when compared to the pop song. After group discussion, students concluded that pop rhythm is more realistic to day-by-day movement rhythms, and classical and samba rhythms were considered as bradycardic and tachycardic movements, respectively. …show more content…
Thus, the cardiac rhythm dance protocol provides a multimedia learning resource to be used as a didactic tool by engaging the students in learning cardiovascular physiology, and allowing the recognition of smartphones as scientific instruments to collect their own data during hands-on activities and others educational