“What does the TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association) Conference have to do with Ready Bodies”, you may ask? Attending the conference has inspired me to expand this blog to include my personal thoughts and findings that support the reason behind  the Ready Bodies, Learning Minds motor lab we call Brain Train Depot .  While in Austin this past week, I found a jewel that I would like to share with you.  According to the cover story of USA Today, July 12, 2005 titled “Childhood Pastimes Are Increasingly Moving Indoors (Fishing, Biking, and Sports Giving Way to Video Games) by Dennis Cauchon, “The fundamental nature of American childhood has changed in a single generation.  The unstructured outdoor childhood-days of pickup baseball games, tree houses, and “be home for dinner”- has all but vanished.  Today childhood is spent mostly indoors, watching television, playing video games and working the Internet.  When children do go outside, it tends to be for scheduled events-soccer camp or a fishing derby-held under the watch of adults.  A child is six times more likely to play a video game on a typical day than to ride a bike, according to the surveys by the Kaiser Foundation….The change can be seen in children’s brains.  Studies indicate that children who spend lots of time outdoors have longer attention spans than kids who watch lots of television and play video games.  Click on the USA Today link to read the article in its entirety.