Hi, I’m Jane, a 2nd year medical student. For our SSC2b project, my group worked on trying to promote healthy eating in children.
Being well aware of the unhealthy Scottish diet, we were driven to educate and instil healthy eating habits in children. Although our initial research demonstrated that much has been done in Scottish schools to educate children, we thought that the method of delivering such educational content could be improved. This led us to creating educational yet fun healthy eating games and activities.
Using online games and activities to engage with children
Coming into the project, we were looking forward to the idea of being able to host interactive workshops to educate school children using our healthy eating games and activities. However, our plan was quickly made unfeasible thanks to the pandemic. Although we were initially disappointed, we stepped up to the challenge and used it to spur our creativity and problem-solving skills to brainstorm other alternatives.
Ultimately, we decided to create a website and use it as a platform for us to upload our games and activities to educate children about healthy eating in a fun and interactive manner. Each week, we worked on creating various activities. Some examples include worksheets, Mad Libs, a healthy eating board game, a grocery shopping game and cooking tutorials. We also realised that education surrounding food hygiene and safety was lacking, and hence, we created posters and included them in our website.
Embracing the process of reflection
And of course, I can’t get away without talking about reflection, which is the main aim of the SSC2b project. Despite being always told of the importance of reflection in medical school, it wasn’t until now that I gained a much deeper insight into the formal process of reflection. The weekly reflective blog posts we wrote by employing the different reflective models have helped to hone our reflective skills. As a group, we appreciated the opportunity to develop our reflective skills through SSC2b and recognise its importance in driving self-development.
Thank you Melissa!
We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to our lovely supervisor, Melissa, who provided her guidance and support throughout our project. Her expertise in the field of nutrition as well as her experience being a mother of two children proved to be invaluable. In addition, we got to trial our website and activities on her daughters. Seeing the happy faces of her daughters (via pictures and videos) engaging in our games and activities was definitely an added bonus!
Do check out our healthy eating activities on our website. I highly recommend watching our cooking tutorials and trying out our Mad Libs!
>>Visit our website ‘Eat Smart’
