Healthy Outlook Blog

Vote For Your Favorite Apps For Healthy Kids

By Lisa Collier Cool | Posted August 11 2010

Children, Games, Health Tips, Mobile Applications, Technology

GE has partnered with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sponsor a cool contest with $60,000 in prizes called Apps for Healthy Kids. It’s part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, which has set the ambitious goal of ending childhood obesity within a generation. The competition challenges students, software and game designers, and other innovators to create entertaining, engaging games and software to inspire kids, especially those ages 9 to 12, to eat healthier meals and exercise more.

Hurry to the Apps for Healthy Kids site, because voting ends on Sunday, August 14 at noon EST. Registered visitors have the opportunity to vote for their favorite app. All entries use the USDA nutrition dataset. Click here for a look at the contenders and vote for a clever solution that will tackle childhood obesity, which threatens the future health of one-third of American kids. Rates have tripled over the past 30 years. Unless the problem is solved, today’s kids could have a shorter lifespan than their parents.

Among the finalists is “Tony’s Plate Calculator,” an online tool to calculate nutritional values for a single item, a recipe or an entire day’s worth of food. Other popular contenders include: “Chef Solus and the Food Pyramid Adventure,” a free online video game that brings the USDA food pyramid to life, and “Earn the Stars” a software tool to educate and reward kids for making healthy eating choices and being physically active.

Also scoring high in the votes right now are “Food Buster,” a free online game that asks kids to carefully stack foods that don’t break the scale, and “Fitopolis Stacks,” a game with different levels to challenge kids to pick the healthy choices as foods fall from the sky. Which one will win? You be the judge!

Connect the Dots.

To vote or learn more, go to Apps for Healthy Kids. The USDA nutrition dataset used in the contest is online, along with links to resources on healthy eating provided for contestants. For tips and resources to encourage kids to be more physically active, check out the Let’s Move site.

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