Gamified learning makes healthy eating lessons stick.
In the last 18 years, more than 265,000 Kiwi kids have been helped to make healthier food choices thanks to the free nutrition education programme Food for Thought.
Now the team behind that initiative has come up with an innovative way to teach valuable nutritional skills to even more tamariki.
The Food for Thought Educational Trust has developed Nutrition Quest, an animated digital learning programme.
With Nutrition Quest, kids can now travel virtually across the islands of Foodtopia on a mission to bring nourishing food back to the islands. Along the way, they learn key concepts such as why it’s important to eat a variety of foods, including different coloured fruit and vegetables.
It’s designed as a fun way to get the vital message about the benefits of healthy eating across to even more children.
Funded by the Foodstuffs co-operatives and delivered in partnership with the Heart Foundation, the Food for Thought programme involves a Food for Thought nutritionist visiting Year 5 and 6 classrooms and taking pupils to their local PAK’nSAVE, New World or Four Square to put healthy eating principles into practice.
“The fact that Food for Thought has been able to reach so many tamariki all over New Zealand since it started in 2007 has been amazing, but we want to reach even more,” says Sandy Botterill, the chair of Food for Thought’s board of trustees.
“We’re not able to physically get to every school, but with Nutrition Quest we can reach tamariki anywhere in the country, empowering them with this valuable information and life skills.”
With many diet-related health issues on the rise and families facing cost-of-living pressures, teaching tamariki how to make healthy, affordable food choices has never been more important.
The Food for Thought team brought in a global leader in learning solutions, Cognition Evolve, to develop an innovative digital experience to engage and inspire New Zealand primary school students.
Botterill says they also consulted with teachers, students and parents to get their input and tested the programme in classrooms to make sure it really works. “Teachers were very much onboard with helping their students to understand about how eating different kinds of foods affects their bodies and minds. We wanted to make it easy and low prep for the teachers, who aren’t nutritionists, as well as lots of fun, so that the kids would engage with it.”
Nutrition Quest launched in June and has already received registrations for over 1500 children, primarily in Years 5 and 6. “The feedback we’ve had so far has been great,” says Botterill. “The teachers say it’s very easy to use and the kids just want to keep playing it. And as they’re playing, they’re learning so much.”
The quest takes children to four different islands representing the four food groups – fruit and vegetables, protein foods, milk products and grains – where they watch animated educational videos and complete a series of tasks. It uses interactive storytelling and real-world activities like going to the supermarket to pass on information such as the difference between “everyday” and “sometimes” foods.
Nutrition Quest can also be used as a follow-up resource to those who have had the in-person Food for Thought programme.
“Another good thing is that it can be dual purpose,” points out Botterill. “For those tamariki who’ve had the nutritionists at their school, doing Nutrition Quest online afterwards helps to embed what they’ve learned through the online games.”
Both the in-person sessions and the online programme explain in an easy-to-understand manner why it’s important for people to eat a variety of foods – for example, pointing out how the calcium in dairy foods helps to build strong bones. Hopefully they’ll create life-long healthy eating habits, says Botterill, who is also the Head of Environmental Social Governance at Foodstuffs NZ.
“We’re giving children knowledge so they can make really good choices when it comes to food, now and in the future,” says Botterill.
“We hear stories all the time about the difference this knowledge makes. Just last week a student told us they started eating breakfast when they hadn’t before, and noticed how much better they felt at school. That’s really making a difference.”
Another benefit of children understanding the importance of good nutrition is the ripple effect it can have on their families.
Botterill says, “We hear about kids who are going shopping with their parents and asking, ‘Can we try this or that?’ If they do take what they’ve learned from Food for Thought home to their wider whānau, that’s awesome. It’s really empowering children.”
Find out more about Food for Thought Programmes here: In-person and digital nutrition education empowering healthier futures