The portable devices as means to promote children’s active lifestyle: the case of a walk to school action in Italy

Children’s autonomy in European countries has sharply declined in the last decades in correspondence with the decrease of their daily physical activity as for example free play and walk to school. Moreover, the use of desktop computer and electronic devices has been often related (Laurson et al., 2008) to sedentary behaviours in children (the so-called screen time). Nevertheless, the development of portable devices, with which children play the same electronic games and applications they used to play at desktop computers, opens new perspectives in the relationship between the screen time and physical activity.