Veggies4myHeart

Program to promote vegetable consumption in preschool children

The Veggies4myHeart project is a ciTechCare initiative aimed at promoting vegetable consumption among preschool children. To support this goal, we developed the digital game Veggies4myHeart (now available on the Play Store and App Store) with teachers and students from the University of Leiria and Oeste’s Dietetics and Nutrition and Digital Games and Multimedia departments. Alongside this educational tool, we also created a children’s story and a sticker booklet featuring the same digital game characters.
With the support of these educational tools, we hold food education sessions in kindergartens, where we promote the five vegetables from the Veggies4myHeart game: carrot, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and red cabbage. 

We chose these vegetables because they are the most common in school canteens.
The project methodology is based on 5 educational sessions supported by educational tools created for this purpose (a digital game, a children’s story, and a booklet), along with repeated exposure to the five vegetables and children’s sensory exploration (touch, taste, sound).
One week before the educational sessions, the children’s knowledge of and consumption of vegetables in the classroom are evaluated. The same evaluation is repeated one week after the educational sessions end. The research team created the assessment tools, which involve identifying fifteen foods through photographs, recognising the vegetables in that group, and identifying the functions in the human body associated with each of the five vegetables in the project.
Veggies4myHeart aims to fill one of the most important gaps in children’s diets by increasing contact with and acceptance of the most commonly eaten vegetables in school canteens, using a methodology already used in other international projects with very satisfactory results.

Keywords: Nutrition Education, Vegetables, Preschool children, Health literacy, Serious Games, Vegetables

Principal Investigator: Cátia Braga-Pontes (catia.pontes@ulo.pt)

Research Team:

Duration: (2018 – to date)

Institutional Partners and Others

  • Municipality of Leiria
  • Computer Science and Communication Research Centre – CIIC
  • Geneva School of Health Sciences
  • HES-SO

Funding

  • Challenges Accelerator – Challenges in Cardiology
  • CCISP-HES-SO – Seed money for joint Swiss-Portuguese academic projects

Veggies4myHeart – Youtube