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Michelle Obama's healthy apps initiative announces winners
The White House's "Apps for Healthy Kids" initiative, fronted by First Lady Michelle Obama, has picked its winners. Among games, first place goes to Trainer, which encourages kids to train with virtual animals. Other winners include Fitter Critters, about properly feeding a virtual pet; Food Hero, which combines nutrition info with exercise challenges; and Smash Your Food, encouraging exercise through pantomiming Gallagher performances. Oh, wait! That last one is actually an app that displays the sugar, salt and oil contents of certain foods as they explode. That's ... actually still pretty funny.
White House courts devs to make healthy eating games
In a video presentation at the Game Developers Choice Awards, White House chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra discussed the Apps for Healthy Kids project, a plan to encourage game developers to collaborate with government to work against childhood obesity. The latest component, an Apps for Healthy Kids contest tasks game developers with creating games that help encourage good exercise and diet habits among kids and give parents information about what their children eat -- with $40,000 in prizes for the winning games. The apps, to be submitted in either "tool" or "game" categories, will integrate the data from MyFoodapedia.gov, a database of the caloric content of common food. In a letter, First Lady Michelle Obama told game devs, "You know better than most the power of games to deeply engage our nation's youth. Today I'm asking you to dedicate your creative energy skills to address one of America's biggest challenges and help make healthy living fun, exciting and relevant for kids." [Via Gamasutra]
