Now that the winners for the forward-leaning "Apps for Healthy Kids" program have been announced, it's clear that there are some huge opportunities for inspiring children with interactive, and specifically video game content. This is something I've been hoping for since I launched What They Play, the family guide to video games way back in 2007. Introduced as part of First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign, with the ambitious objective of ending childhood obesity within a generation, the goals for the "Apps..." program were certainly very admirable; build experiences using the USDA nutrition data set, and promote awareness of the benefits of physical activity, caloric intake, lean proteins, and a number of other common sense health concepts that, let's face it, are epic snooze fests for the average 10 year-old.
Judged by a disparate panel of expert judges, including Zynga's Mark Pincus, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and LucasArts' Eric Johnston, the dozen applications that were picked as this year's winners show a tremendous amount of creativity, and between them hint at the potential for a kind of fitness, diet, and social gaming experience that could transform the way kids think about this stuff. However individually they still have a long way to go if we're going to meet the program's objective.
The ongoing challenge, of course, is keeping kids engaged, and in the right way. We all know that our children would happily sit in front of a screen indefinitely if we let them, but limiting their screen time while filling their heads with knowledge is quite a doozy of a task. The problem with many of this first round of healthy kids' apps is that they present their educational objectives front and center, and tackle the challenges set in an academic rather than entertaining way. Sure, they're fun and they're colorful, but they make you feel like you're cramming for a test about food types or the importance of push-ups rather than playing a game. For this stuff to really work in the long term, the focus needs to shift.
Why? The best example I can give is how my own son discovered a talent for math. As the responsible parents we like to believe we are, my wife and I bought educational toys, activity books, and all of the dutiful stuff that you think you're supposed to, but the whole concept only really clicked for him when his love of football and his love of video games collided. Every weekend he and I would play Madden Football on the Wii together, and from this he learned how to think in multiples of six and seven, he learned subtraction and division, while at the same time learning how to destroy his old man with an uncannily keen tactical awareness.
The key, of course, is that we were playing a game in which there was some educational value. What we're seeing in this first round of healthy apps are (mostly) educational applications in which there is some game play. Games winner David Villatoro is definitely on the right track with his Pokémon-like web game Trainer, but the long term prospects for this field are going to depend on a willingness to fully embrace game play and the culture of video games.