The Grady`s Garden Digital Edutainment and Engagement Project to Improve Health and Nutrition Among Children of Color Who Live in Underserved Communities

Low fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption is an established risk factor for many chronic diseases; current consumption among children is alarmingly inadequate. Engaging children through school and afterschool settings is a viable strategy to make positive changes but for transformational and sustainable impact messaging must also reach families educators and beyond. Grady's Garden includes animated episodes that chronicle the lives of diverse children who create a garden in their urban neighborhood and episode-tailored Experiential Learning Extensions (ELEs) that include activities such as recipes tastings worksheets and physical activity. The ELE core knowledge areas are health nutrition and physical activity; science via gardening lessons; and social-emotional learning. Four episodes with ELEs were translated into digital format (GG-App) and pilot-tested in Phase I demonstrating promising results and critical learnings regarding user experience. In Phase II we will transform lesson plans into interactive engaging lessons; build a centralized repository of lesson plans best practices and tools aligned with the GG-App's educational content; create educator training courses for each module; build a data collection aggregation and analytics portal with an intuitive dashboard; conduct small- scale implementation testing of the GG-App; and develop a market plan for system-based licenses with schools afterschool and summer programs and parents. Novel noteworthy contributions of the GG-App include addressing food neophobia among children to increase FV consumption as well as increasing physically active screen time; creating new knowledge about the science and practice of gardening and food production; and enhancing child social-emotional skills via lessons on collaboration and community.