The Extension Foundation (EXF) has issued Teaching Youth Food Safety: A Game-Based Experience, a publication written by a team from the New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab.
The publication details how the team is addressing food safety through game-based learning. Their ideas ties into research that indicates youth prefer to learn about food safety topics through interactive educational tools. The publication details how the team developed “Theme Park Cafe”, a food safety game for youth. In the game, players engage in different themed kitchens to serve delicious and safe meals to clients. It’s a redesign of “Ninja Kitchen,” launched in 2011 to teach kids food handling skills. In this publication, the game designers talk about increasing the game’s cultural sensitivity, working with kids to create the reboot, and other elements of using gamification to teach educational content.
This new game, one of several food-related projects funded by the New Technologies in Ag Extension (NTAE) 2022-2023 grant program, is part of a growing trend in Extension: using multimedia products to educate and engage diverse audiences.
The authors of the publication are: Barbara Chamberlin, PhD; Matheus Cezarotto, PhD; and Pamela Martinez, Ed.D, all from New Mexico State University.
This publication was produced through the New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE) program. NTAE is a cooperative agreement between USDA NIFA, Oklahoma State University, and the Extension Foundation. The goal of the New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE) grant is to incubate, accelerate, and expand promising work that will increase the impact of the Cooperative Extension System (CES) in the communities it serves, and provide models that can be adopted or adapted by Extension teams across the nation.
You can learn more about the team’s work in this recent feature article - Leveling Up - published in October 2023. The team also wrote about an alternative to full game design - the game jam process - in an earlier publication. You can access that publication here.
The Extension Foundation has released two dozen publications this fall, including the 2022-2023 NTAE Yearbook, which presents the work of dozens of Extension project teams from across the U.S. in a lively magazine format. You can find the entire library of publications (now numbering nearly five dozen) here.
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