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A midmorning bell rings at Merrill Middle School in Des Moines. Within minutes, a group of seventh-graders races into the brightly painted fitness arcade to claim their favorite games.

Physical education classes at Merrill took a high-tech twist this school year with the addition of the fitness arcade. Even students who normally don’t like gym class can’t wait to jump on the interactive dance and skateboard games, box or play tennis on the Nintendo Wii systems or ride a recumbent bicycle down a virtual trail.

“It’s great,” said seventh-grader Bobbi Garrett, as she danced sock-footed to a music video playing on the Dance Dance Revolution machine. her favorite activity. “You get to have fun while exercising.”

School officials are now in the process of evaluating whether the fitness arcade, located in a renovated space carved out of the locker rooms adjacent to the gymnasium, has improved students’ overall fitness. The project is one of a number of hands-on approaches that Greater Des Moines nonprofit organizations are taking to combat childhood obesity in Iowa.

More than one out of three third- to fifth-graders in Iowa are either overweight or at risk of becoming overweight, according to Shaping America’s Youth, which conducted an Iowa summit on childhood obesity in Des Moines in August 2007. And statistics indicate that overweight children have a 70 percent chance of remaining overweight into adulthood.

Merrill’s fitness arcade was made possible by a nearly $47,000 grant last year from the Wellmark Foundation. Other partners in the project, for which the school’s parent-teacher association raised $5,000, are Des Moines University, Blank Children’s Hospital and Mercy College of Health Sciences’ nursing program.

Through its Growing Up LEAN (Living to be Energetic, Active and Nutritious) grant program, the Wellmark Foundation made childhood obesity prevention an explicit funding priority for the first time last year, Director Matt McGarvey said. About half of the $1.7 million dedicated for grants in 2008 was focused on addressing childhood obesity, he said. One of the programs funded last year enabled the Iowa Department of Public Health to pilot a program for taking body mass index (BMI) measurements of third-grade students across the state. The two-year grant of more than $64,000 is a first step toward a possible statewide BMI surveillance program.

“In many ways, it’s a perfect focus for us,” he said. “We’re preventing the need for (preventable health-care expenditures) by imbedding healthy lifestyles in kids when those lifetime habits are being formed.” The foundation recently narrowed down 82 grant applicants to 17 that it will invite to submit full proposals for possible funding later this year.

Another health-focused nonprofit, the Mid-Iowa Health Foundation (MIHF), partners with a number of Central Iowa organizations working to address childhood obesity.

For instance, MIHF recently approved a $15,000 grant to Iowa State University Extension’s Polk County office, which will be used to purchase software to help students track their level of physical activity as part of Polk County Healthy Schools Centers of Excellence, a comprehensive program.

Other programs the foundation supports include the YMCA of Greater Des Moines’ Trim Kids program, a multidisciplinary 12-week plan for overweight children ages 6 to 18, and the Mercy Foundation’s Hip 2 B Fit program, which provides after-school programs to increase activity levels of students at six Greater Des Moines middle schools.

Blake Hammond, a Merrill science teacher who wrote the grant proposal and helped outfit the arcade space last summer, said parents were “overwhelmingly” in favor of the project.

Though data isn’t yet available, “I think the results will show that those students who have engaged in the arcade beyond their gym time, that their target heart rates will have improved,” he said.

“I think it’s important we give our kids an opportunity to be active,” Hammond said. “Our gymnasium tends to be used every day after school by some team. So now they can use the fitness arcade to get exercise.”