Internet Spawns Online Physical Education

By Darcia Harris Bowman

Florida teenager Jessica M. Fox is "kind of anti-sports" and admits to having no interest in sweating alongside her peers in a high school gym class. So, while her classmates at Cypress Lake High School ran laps last year, the 16-year-old junior logged on to the Internet for a new kind of physical education.

Some 1,600 students statewide are expected to follow in her footsteps this year by enrolling in a cyberspace gym class to knock off the state's high school graduation requirement of one semester of physical education.

"Personal Fitness" is not a video game. The half-credit course is one of the Florida Virtual School's most popular offerings, and it actually requires some real-world exercise. How much and how hard students work out, however, is...