For Judy Shasek, the main competition for her new invention is the chair.

That’s because Shasek, a Tumalo education and fitness consultant and owner of FootPOWR LLC, hopes to transform the way youth and other computer game players learn and play. Her invention is a box that connects to a dance platform that acts like a computer mouse on which players stand.

She’s invented a way to utilize the dance platform — which would otherwise work only with game consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox to play a few wildly popular games such as “Dance Dance Revolution” and “StepMania” — not just for specially programmed games, but on all computers for thousands of games, she said.

Combined with the box, the rectangular dance pad with arrows pointing in all directions allows users to use their feet to control movement for myriad slow- to medium-velocity computer games like a hand-operated mouse would.

Instead of sitting at their computer to play computer games using a hand-operated mouse, players would replicate the mouse functions with semi-rapid steps on the dance pad, she said.

“You don’t need games written for it — that’s the beauty of it,” Shasek told a group of potential investors and the business community at Thursday’s monthly PubTalk at McMenamins Old St. Francis School in Bend.

“It’s pretty cool because lots of health care providers are interested in fitness games,” she said. “The best way to promote health is to get people out of their chairs.”

The invention has garnered the attention of local schools and the health care community, Shasek said.

Her target audience includes youth, mothers who play casual, slower-paced games, and the virtual world gamers who meet online, she said.

She has plans to launch a Web site, www.footgaming.com, which would be an online community for foot gamers that would provide access to several different games, she said.

Some companies have promoted their products, such as cookies and other snacks, to youth through sedentary online games, Shasek said.

“There will be a gauge that measures calorie output with bonus points for burning up the same amount of calories as the food product that the game is promoting,” she said. “That alone is reason enough to make FootPOWR.”

Shasek has tested the product at Tom McCall Elementary School in Redmond and plans to continue testing the new system around local schools this fall, she said.

The box would be manufactured and sold by Salt Lake City-based Cobalt Flux, which makes the dance mats used for “Dance Dance Revolution,” a game played on PlayStation 2, she said.

At Tom McCall Elementary, students already are using the dance platform to stimulate learning, said Heather Renz, a fourth-grade teacher there.

The school owns 20 dance pads, which it uses with PlayStation game consoles to get the students’ brains ready for schoolwork, Renz said.

Shasek’s invention would allow the schools to use the dance pad with multiple other computer-based games — helping their motor skills and sense of spatial relations, she said.

“In these days of childhood obesity, children are getting a little sweat out of their activity,” Renz said. “If it helps with learning, it’s a wonderful thing.”

Shasek already has built-in markets for her invention, including the senior/assisted living homes, schools and workplaces, said Ruth Lindley, marketing manager for Economic Development for Central Oregon, which promotes business development in the region.

The foot-powered dance platform, which would be packaged with the box containing Shasek’s invention, could be sold to schools that are required to provide students a certain amount of physical activity per week, she said.

“She recognized that you can’s just walk into the school system and just change the curriculum,” she said. “She took the existing curriculum and added something to it.”