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Walk to the World Cup 2010
Welcome to the Walk to the World Cup! This initiative has been designed to increase walking levels among primary school children in order to tackle car congestion issues outside the school gate, encourage exercise and reduce the environmental impact associated with school drop off journeys.
Walk to the World Cup will involve nearly 10,000 primary school children in 32 schools in North Tyneside and South Tyneside; it will be the biggest inter-school initiative of the year in the region. Schools have been invited to take part because they have shown an interest in increasing walking levels among pupils.
The campaign aims to capture the imagination of youngsters through setting each school an ambitious but achievable goal to ‘walk to Johannesburg’ in time for the FIFA World Cup final on July 11th. Schools that do not reach the target by this date may choose to continue up until July 23rd, the end of summer term.
The campaign will harness the excitement of the World Cup and foster a sense of participation in the event.
We’ve created leagues to show how far each school has travelled on its journey to Johannesburg, South Africa, and you can follow their progress by clicking here. Leagues have been determined according to the number of pupils in the school – not their walking talent! Minnows have 199 pupils or less; the Championship between 200 and 299, and the Premier League 300 and over. We’ve decided to help the little guys out – the Minnows will have their distances doubled up so that they can keep up with the bigger schools and to ensure they are not walking over the summer holidays!
As the crow flies it is more than 9,450kms from Newcastle to Johannesburg. The average journey distance to a primary school in England is 1.5 miles (2.4kms). Therefore, if one hundred children were to walk 2 miles (3.22kms) per day (a slight increase in distance), it would take their ‘team’ approximately five and a half weeks to walk to Johannesburg!
32 countries around the world are taking part in the FIFA World Cup and we’ve pulled together some facts and figures about them. Want to know the land area of Greece? Or the currency of Paraguay? You can find out by clicking here.
And to demonstrate the really positive effect of walking instead of taking the car, there’s a handy table to summarise the benefits in terms of reduced air pollution, calories burned and Carbon Dioxide saved. If you want to know how much particulate matter is saved by walking from the River Tyne to Tunisia, or the number of calories burned to get to Johannesburg, this table has all the answers!
