Co-Design and Refinement of Curriculum-Based Foodbot Factory Intervention to Support Elementary School Nutrition Education.

Background/objectives: School-based nutrition education interventions can support the development of children's food literacy and healthy eating habits. The Foodbot Factory serious game was developed to support school nutrition education based on Canada's Food Guide and Ontario curriculum. The objective of this research was to refine the Foodbot Factory intervention to include curriculum-based lesson plans that had a high-level of acceptability by stakeholders to support implementation by teachers in classrooms.

Updating the Foodbot Factory serious game with new interactive engaging features and enhanced educational content.

Serious games (i.e., digital games designed for educational purposes) can foster positive learning attitudes and are increasingly used as educational tools.

Development and pilot testing of the Nutrition Attitudes and Knowledge Questionnaire to measure changes of child nutrition knowledge related to the Canada's Food Guide.

Foodbot Factory is a serious game developed to teach children about the 2019 Canada's Food Guide (CFG) healthy eating principles. Because no measurement tools existed to assess changes in children's knowledge of the CFG, the Nutrition Attitudes and Knowledge (NAK) questionnaire was developed for this purpose. The NAK is based on the 2019 CFG nutrition content and aligned with the Foodbot Factory modules (Drinks, Whole Grain foods, Vegetables and Fruit, Protein foods).

The Effectiveness of the Foodbot Factory Mobile Serious Game on Increasing Nutrition Knowledge in Children.

The interactive and engaging nature of serious games (i.e., video games designed for educational purposes) enables deeper learning and facilitates behavior change; however, most do not specifically support the dissemination of national dietary guidelines, and there are limited data on their impact on child nutrition knowledge.

Optimizing Child Nutrition Education With the Foodbot Factory Mobile Health App: Formative Evaluation and Analysis.

Background: Early nutrition interventions to improve food knowledge and skills are critical in enhancing the diet quality of children and reducing the lifelong risk of chronic disease. Despite the rise of mobile health (mHealth) apps and their known effectiveness for improving health behaviors, few evidence-based apps exist to help engage children in learning about nutrition and healthy eating.

Objective: This study aimed to describe the iterative development and user testing of Foodbot Factory, a novel nutrition education gamified app for children to use at home or in the classroom and to present data from user testing experiments conducted to evaluate the app.