A028: AI and Education: The Impact of Virtual Physical Education onPhysical Fitness of College Students

<bold>Background/Purpose:</bold> Educational artificial intelligence has been attracting peoples’ attention as a high-profile research topic. At the end of 2022, the boom of ChatGPT raised a trend to discuss whether the best future education is virtual education or AI education. However, the impact of the new education model which tends to cancel school entities still deserves further exploration. Especially, the impact of this new education model on students' physical fitness needs to be studied. <bold>Method:</bold> Research data are supported by the physical education academic of Jiaying University in south China. Each year, every Chinese university will complete an annual physical fitness test for undergraduates. Totally, physical fitness test data of 15,000 Chinese undergraduate students were monitored before and after the intervention. After data collection and cleaning, paired-samples t-test was applied to analyze the differences between the data before and after the intervention. <bold>Results:</bold> As the analysis results demonstrated, after 8 months of intervention, the body size index: BMI had increased significantly both in males and females; the vital capacity test results of all students had declined; Aerobic capacity: male students had shown different trends from females, with males’ data being better than before; Flexibility and explosive power of all college students were obviously improved; Strength quality indexes, such as timed sit-ups (female) and pull-ups (male), have both decreased slightly. <bold>Conclusion/Discussion:</bold> The possible effects of large-scale AI online physical education on college students' physical strength are still worthy of further exploration. Based on the research above, for universities, abolishing the college entity may result in increased BMI, reduced cardiopulmonary function, and weakened women's aerobic endurance and men’s flexibility. If the problems of BMI, cardiopulmonary function, women's aerobic endurance, and men’s flexibility can be solved, it is possible that college physical education could be implemented without school entities.