Warm-up games are widespread practices in multiple activities across domains, yet little scholarly work can be found about their role in physical training. Here, we study potential goals and benefits of warm-up games, and explore opportunities for technology inclusion through investigating a collection of warm-up games gathered: online, from a survey of online warm-up games curated, described, and used by Physical Education teachers; and in person, from an ongoing design research work as part of a technology-supported circus training course. Further, in the context of the latter, we conducted explorative design interventions, augmenting a range of the warm-up games with wearable technology. Our work surfaces major goals and benefits of warm-up games, which can be broadly classified as preparing participants physically, socially, and mentally. We also show how the inclusion of open-ended technology can support these goals and discuss broader opportunities for technology inclusion in warm-up games.

Technology probes have been used in co-creative embodied design processes to spur creativity and generate design ideas. We present a range of Training Technology Probes (TTPs), designed to facilitate collocated physical and social training. We deployed them in the context of a physical training course for children with motor challenges, where they were tested and iterated onsite through our participants' (instructors' and children's) creative uses. We report on intended/expected uses as well as improvised ones resulting from creative appropriations that were found useful in our physical activity. We discuss key core properties of the TTPs that supported productive creative appropriation. This work adds to others on technology probes by emphasizing their generative value in goal-oriented somatic explorations and practices, like our training course.

Physical training can be frustrating and hard, especially for those who experience additional challenges to access and control their proprioceptive senses. In the context of designing for children with Sensory-based Motor Disorder, we designed and deployed a series of Training Technology Probes to be used in circus training. Here we focus on how these were used, tested, and appropriated by children and instructors during a six-week circus training course. Through these explorations, we identified a range of potential benefits from using their functions in training. We present the Physical Training Technology Probes and the benefits they brought to training. We show how the technology functions helped children focus and provided feedback related to posture and balance. Furthermore, their open-ended designs and versatile options for use were crucial in exploring their contributions to training, and in how they helped foster creative engagement with technology and training. Our work contributes towards understanding the specific requirements when designing for the target group, and more generally contributes with design strategies for technology support for skill training.