Ongoing projects

Through the “Bewegungsbande” project, the University of Kassel, the City of Kassel, Techniker Krankenkasse Hessen, and numerous sports clubs are joining forces to integrate more physical activity into the daily lives of children and adolescents, thereby promoting their health and social participation in a sustainable way.

The goal of the project is to structurally and sustainably embed additional daily physical activity into the lives of children and adolescents. The focus is particularly on daycare centers, schools, and sports clubs, as well as on fostering collaboration among these stakeholders within each neighborhood. The central focus is on promoting a childhood and adolescence characterized by physical activity and good health.

Cycassel is an initiative of the University of Kassel that brings together students, academia, and the local community. Cycassel emerged from an interdisciplinary seminar organized by the Institute for Sport and Sports Science (IfSS), the BMDV Endowed Chair in Cycling and Local Mobility, and the core curriculum of the University of Kassel. In doing so, Cycassel combines perspectives from sports science with insights from urban society, creating opportunities to apply scientific findings to Kassel and to integrate social issues into sports science research. In this sense, Cycassel builds upon the work of the Transfer and Application Center for Sport in Kassel (task) in terms of both content and concept. TASK aims to play an active role in societal change processes in the areas of physical activity and health by making scientific findings accessible and usable for the urban community, while also incorporating and scientifically examining ideas from the urban community.

Cycling is part of everyday life for many children and teenagers. As they get older, students increasingly participate in traffic on their own and, for example, ride their bikes to school. At the same time, accident statistics show that there is a higher incidence of accidents, particularly among cyclists aged 9 to 15. This was the focus of the project “Ride Smart, Reduce Risks—Accident Prevention for Young Cyclists,” which ran from April 2024 to April 2026. In collaboration with the Hessian Ministry of Culture, Education, and Opportunities (HMKB), the Central Office for School Sports and Physical Activity Promotion (ZFS), and the German Traffic Safety Association (DVW), instructional modules on accident prevention were developed. The focus was on how to raise young people’s awareness of road traffic risks at an early stage and empower them to act in a proactive and safe manner. The goal was to develop a modular teaching concept from which teachers could select appropriate modules for their classes and incorporate them into their (physical education) lessons.

This toolbox on sustainability and cycling is a collection of tasks and materials developed specifically for schools to comprehensively address the topic of cycling in a school context. This toolkit has been designed with a clear motivation, specific goals and milestones to give pupils a holistic understanding of sustainable mobility.

With our project "Get Up . Stand Up . Move Up" in cooperation with our "Psychology and Society" department and the "Education and Teaching" department with Task and the TSG Wilhelmshöhe e.V. handball youth development association, we have created an initially digital offering for children of primary school age, which will be continued as a hybrid format from April. The aim is to encourage children to exercise regularly, even during lockdown and the pandemic, and to learn about the possibilities and limitations of the digital world.