BITE

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

My idea is to create a school-based healthy eating programme for young children with the aim of educating them about healthy eating. The concept is to create a social network where children can play games and learn about eating well as well as be rewarded for eating healthy food. This is taken over into their school lives with a second programme which supplies healthy, local food to the children on their lunch breaks. They are rewarded with cinema tickets, badges, clothing as well as extra lunch time, etc.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

My communication approach is mainly aimed towards children, as such I have focussed on creating bright, fun environments and characters to better engage them. I have created posters to hang around school classrooms and hallways to advertise the programme. I feel to truly engage them I needed an interactive method; as such I created an online network where children can interact with their classmates, see their ‘point score’, play games and challenge friends. All of this is secretly educating young children on the benefits of healthy eating and why they should. As well as this, a fortnightly reward scheme is in place to give children a little more incentive to eat well. Finally, I have a sheet where the children can mark down what they eat and calculate their scores for the day.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

I feel that educating children while they are young is the most beneficial and successful way to teach them. The first five years of a child’s life are the most impressionable, if they form a habit then it becomes much harder to break later on in life. As such, I feel that teaching children to eat well and then giving the option to keep this trend up will improve society immensely. Every year millions of dollars are spent on illnesses related to obesity - quality of life will be vastly improved for everyone if we just ate healthier.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

The most shocking thing I learnt was just how wide-spread obesity was and how quickly it is increasing. For a health issue that is entirely self-caused it is astounding at how quickly and severely obesity is growing. I feel that if an adult wants to eat unhealthily then it is their choice; however, when a child is forced to eat a high calorie diet due to irresponsible parenting I feel it is morally wrong. The challenge comes in educating children on how to eat properly and healthily; hopefully it will be a lesson for life and these growing obesity rates will start to decline. I was also shocked at how susceptible children are from advertising and the shocking tactics fast-food companies will employ in order to appeal to young children. The only way to beat this problem is to beat these companies at their own game.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

I feel my work is good communication work due to how I try to connect to my target audience. Children are far more susceptible to characters and bright packaging in order to attract them to the product. I feel I have employed this in my design but with enough of a professional feel that schools and parents alike would be drawn to the products. I have kept a consistent feel across all my products which promote the brand and still attract children to it. Most importantly though, I feel that it engages kids and makes them want to learn more and hopefully prevent them from following a high calorie diet.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

As my target is primarily school children the majority of work will be throughout the school environment. I would also target parents and teachers in the hope that they enforce the healthy eating routine and help mark the point system. I would implement it in Brisbane schools first and if it was successful then make it a national programme. In order to gain money to provide the school lunches - parents would have to pay a small sum each week. I would justify this by saying that instead of paying $15 dollars a week for your child’s lunches, you pay BITE and we will sort out the meals for your child from local produce. Any child can be on the programme, if they opt out of the lunches they still have the choice to be a part of the rewards scheme and the social media site. Hopefully they actively choose to eat healthier.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

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