The aim of this study is to explore the potential of a school excursion to a science museum to increase primary school pupils’ physical activity (PA) during school hours.

As children in developed countries spend approximately one third of their time in school nine months per year (World Health Organization, 2004), and children from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds can be reached (Nielsen et al., 2011), the school has been identified as an essential setting for promotion of PA (Boreham & Riddoch, 2001). Furthermore, promotion of PA in a school setting has potential to engage the one out of four children (Mygind, 2007) who have no or little interest in in sports and physical activity, that is, children who are in particular risk of performing too little PA.

Simovska et al. (2015) observed school-based initiatives to promote PA are often extra-curricular activities or ‘add-ons’ to schools’ and teachers’ main objectives and everyday practice. Being an extra task on top of other teaching obligations can act as a barrier to the implementation of school based PA promotion initiatives (Simovska et al., 2015), and this may be one of the reasons why the outcomes of school-based interventions are mixed (Pucher et al., 2013). While effective school-based promotion of PA is multifarious and holistic (National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1997), integrating promotion of PA with schools’ main aims and objectives in such a way that teachers and students experience them as ‘add-ins’, rather ‘add-ons’, could facilitate implementation.

Education outside the classroom (EOtC) (Bentsen et al. 2009; 2010; Jordet, 2010) might provide such an add-in, in which PA is an integral part of learning activities. EOtC implies a practice of recurring excursions in which curriculum-based learning takes place. Hereby, settings outside the school, such as cultural institutions, playgrounds, graveyards, green spaces, and forests, are used as settings for learning.The idea of EOtC is, in other words, to provide an engaging learning environment that provides PA while adhering to educational goals through regular curriculum-based excursions to environments external to the school. Furthermore, EOtC, as a mode of active learning that requires equal active participation from all students, has potential to supersede socially and culturally bound differences in PA, for example the well-established gap in levels of PA between boys and girls (Ridgers et al. 2006).

Based on these previous findings, we hypothesise that integrating PA into curriculum-based teaching can contribute to children reaching higher levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and decreasing sedentary behaviour. While some research has been carried out on the influence of EOtC on children’s PA levels, to our knowledge, no studies have looked at the potential of school excursions to science centres to increase PA during school hours. This type of learning activity are a common and growing practice in Denmark (Skoletjenesten, 2015) and may provide an easily applied add-in  with the potential to increase PA levels. Anecdotal evidence from museum practitioners indicates that children are physically active when visiting science museums. This directs our hypothesis in that we expect children to be more physically active during a school day including an excursion to the science centre compared to an ordinary school day.

While the evidence for the health benefits of PA is sound, there are also strong indications that movement integration in school enhances cognitive function, increases academically standardised test-scores, promotes enjoyment and positive affect, and improves on-task behaviour in children (Webster et al. 2015). Therefore, although health is a justified goal in itself, promotion of PA during school hours appears to feed in to educational purposes also.

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