#phasummit

[drraptjr]

#Repost @hhphorg ・・・ "What new strategies can we employ so that children will grow up without the threat of #obesity, #diabetes and chronic diseases?" #ParntershipForAHealtherAmerica President Dr. Gavin setting the stage for a dynamic #PHASummit.

[ndemaymediagroup]

2016 Building a Healthier Future Summit

Photos by Cheriss May | Ndemay Media Group

Washington, DC – On Friday, May 20th at the Renaissance Downtown Hotel, First Lady Michelle Obama, As part of her Let’s Move! initiative and as honorary chair of the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), delivered the keynote address where she unveiled the new, modernized Nutrition Facts Label, at the Building a Healthier Future Summit.

Each year PHA’s Summit brings together nonprofit, government, private sector, philanthropic, and academic leaders to generate innovative solutions that help kids and families lead healthier lives. This is PHA’s 5th Building a Healthier Future Summit. | ©2016 Photos by Cheriss May, www.cherissmay.com

[amywutoo]

my first hackathon experience

Childhood obesity is a preventable epidemic that is currently affecting more than a third of today’s children in the United States, regardless of race, ethnicity, family income or locale. Driven largely by unhealthy diets and eating patterns and lack of physical activity, it puts children at risk of serious, life-threatening health conditions in the future and negatively affects their performance in school.

Fortunately, there are many things that can be done to reverse this trend and for the last three years, the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) has been devoted to working with the private sector to help address this crisis. This past month, they hosted a Hackathon in Washington, DC in collaboration with The Feast, inviting designers, developers, strategists and high school students from the Academy For Software Engineering in New York City to help find tangible, creative solutions to end childhood obesity.

The two challenges at hand were (1) Helping teachers empower students to make healthy choices about the food they consume, whether at home or at school (2) Creating an information avenue that shows families the healthy food options and physical activity opportunities available to them locally.

Over the course of two days, on March 8 & 9, we hacked away at childhood obesity. We  took on the task of how to make healthy choices the easy choice for families and children at school. There were two teams, schools and home, which each had 3 groups of 4 to 6 people. There were speakers and mentors coming around to the individual groups during the weekend Hackathon. Judging was based on 4 criteria: accessibility, innovation, impact value and user.

The IxDers that went down to DC consisted of Michie Cao, Effy Zhang, and Amy Wu. We were placed on three separate groups. Independently, each of our teams came up with a website as the platform of choice because the key insights were a) students are not allowed to bring their cell phone to school b) not everyone has a smartphone and c) some people have limited access to a computer.

Teams had 24-hours to prototype their ideas and presented to a board of nutritionists, teachers, PHA stakeholders and White House officials. The two winning teams presented their idea a week later at The Building a Healthier Future Summit, during which businesses, industry leaders, non-profits, academic and government counterparts, and First Lady Michelle Obama attended to discuss their achievements thus far and further solutions for the paramount issue.  

An intense, action-packed weekend, we three had an awesome time. The Hackathon was a first for Effy and Amy. Some major highlights of our Washington, DC trip included: meeting and getting to work with people from other disciplines and backgrounds, being able to produce a tangible product in two day’s time, touring the National Mall and of course, getting to see the first lady as the closing keynote speaker! 

Michie and Effy participated on the school end and I was working on a family oriented solution with my team.

My team consisted of three developers (which included one high school student), and two designers. We called ourselves Team SmartCart and our concept was a responsive website that allows any family to manage their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food budget wisely and learn how to cook different meals with their fresh produce through a curated recipe directory. A user would create a family profile, which includes the members within the family, and their food preferences, known allergies, and based upon these preferences recipes are generated. The recipes list could be further paired down through a filtering system, for example, depending on what type of cuisine they wished to cook for a particular meal. After selecting a recipe or recipes, a shopping list is populated for easy on the go use. All items on the shopping list are SNAP approved items.

We marketed ourselves as not just a pantry/shopping list manager. One clear competitor being the “Out of Milk” app, which many WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) moms use.

SmartCart is a cooking and food shopping service that

1. Helps caretakers decide what to buy amongst SNAP-approved items based on two important factors

(a) custom preferences of budget, time, and individual family member’s needs (b) recipe generation and filtering system

2. Populating a shopping list to bring to the grocery store

3. Ability to print out or view on a desktop/smartphone the shopping list and recipe for later use

Ultimate Goal: To cook and enjoy a healthy meal with your family that can be prepared quickly and easily

You can find our group’s thinking, process, design and the data sets we parsed from on our hackpad. Here is our final presentation deck. And check out our working prototype on Flinto. Given the time constraint we had many additions for version 2.0, including a physical activity component.

Michie and Effy outlined their own experiences from the Hackathon and their key takeaways as well!

From Effy Zhang: Our group created a school-centered, mobile-friendly website uniting students through a gamified nutritional tracker. Classes form teams within a school and compete to have the highest number of points, points were gained by making healthy food choices.  It also works for schools competing against other schools. Winners can win prizes, such as non-food rewards, like movie tickets.Audience: Grade 6~8

Background: School Day = ⅔ of a middle schooler’s nutrition, middle school is also when kids are starting to make independent choices about food and when kids are the most susceptible to behavior change.

Key insights:

School children want to collect Pokemon Cards.

Have a great pride in their class.

Description: Students play this game as a team. They win point through making healthy food choices or lose points by eating rubbish food. More point they got, higher level character they have the class. They can check the class or personal performance online by week or month. Students can chat with other team members, share advice, "brag" and motivate others. They can also rate meals and provide feedback to cafeteria support staff; the website can make a recommendation to students based on other team members' ratings of school meals or food choices. All the data been collected directly from school’s cafeteria when students check out.

Next step: Bonus points are awarded to students for participating in physical activity. Perhaps avatar upgrades (levels) for classes with better point averages. These avatar upgrades are designed to directly reflect student choice and instill peer-to-peer accountability.

Check out more details about our project here and the final presentation.

- - -

From Michie Cao: For the Hackathon, my teammates and I chose to tackle the first challenge of empowering teachers to help students make healthier food choices.  Inspired by an elementary school teacher, who started an Iron Chef-like challenge within her school to teach her students about cooking skills and healthy eating, we decided to make an online video platform called Applesauce that could facilitate such collaborative video making in schools for students and also allow parents, local vendors and the greater community get involved either by donating the cooking ingredients or commenting and voting on their favorite videos.   This idea came from insights we had gained through interviews with teachers, community organizers and students like:

Kids like to learn by doing

Kids appreciate validation from their peers

Schools preferred working with local food vendors (even if they were unable to, for reasons of limited resource or time)

A user journey video of how Applesauce could be used.

For more details, please visit our team’s hackpad.

Our hope was that this platform would not only be a fun way for students to learn about cooking and healthy eating, but also serve as a piece of curriculum for teachers and a food resource for parents. Provided with a Resource Starter Pack that outlines a sample program for teachers to follow, teachers would be able to incorporate these video activities into their curriculum and better engage their students. Driven by the ability to get new “badges” and elevate to new chef “levels”, students would be encouraged to both be their own content creators and learn important life skills like cooking.  Lastly, parents would be able to refer to this website for new cooking recipes that their kids are sure to like.  Ultimately, this Hackathon provided me the invaluable opportunity to collaborate with developers and other designers and take part in a cause that’s extremely relevant and important to our current generation.  It was a great way for me to develop some work and quickly learn how to communicate with people from different backgrounds and to all my fellow designers who may have a chance to participate in a Hackathon, I greatly recommend it!

[feastongood]

PHA Innovation Challenge, Day 1

This morning, The Feast team woke up in our D.C. airbnb and walked over to the PHA HQ to set up the second annual PHA Innovation Challenge.

Healthy start to the morning. 

Ready for work + play.

Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) is an organization dedicated to solving the childhood obesity epidemic with support from the First Lady Michelle Obama. We really believe in the work that they do and have been fans for a while now. At last year's Feast Conference, PHA helped present our Health Challenge, and the audience had the pleasure of hearing from the Chief Strategy Officer Ryan Shadrick Wilson. As we dove into the topic of healthy habits, we also heard from other inspiring speakers like Cullen Jones, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who advocates for child health through physical activity. (See Ryan's talk here & Cullen's talk here.)

Now, we're back to get even more granular. The PHA Innovation Challenge is a hackathon that looks to optimize two specific areas relevant to the childhood obesity epidemic:

1. Healthy food curriculum in schools 2. Access to healthy food and physical activity for low-income families

Designers, developers, strategists, and industry experts will gather into two groups to share stories and problem-solve. By the end of the day tomorrow, teams of hackers will have created something tangible to present to the group at large, and the strongest ideas will be elevated. The winning hackers from each topic will take the stage at the PHA Summit next week, putting their ideas in front of key decision makers passionate about this exact issue.

Cool, right? We think so too.

Before the hackers got fully into work mode today, we were lucky enough to hear from some amazing and inspiring speakers who know their way around the conversation of childhood obesity.

First up, we had Julie Moreno, the Public Health Advisor for Childhood Obesity at the White House. She works closely with the First Lady Michelle Obama and has been at the White House for four years now. Julie has always had a strong interest in public health and is personally invested in the cause, as many members of her family continue to struggle with health issues themselves. When asked about today's PHA Innovation Challenge, Julie's enthusiasm was evident, "I'm most excited to hear people think outside the box on these solutions and to see fresh ideas from people who may or may not have been looking at the problem before."

Our next speaker was Bill Dietz, Director of the Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Bill worked abroad in Guatemala for a while and began his career studying undernutrition before making the switch to overnutrition. He enjoys his work at the CDC because he "needed to be in a place where [childhood obesity] could be a national issue." Furthermore, when asked about the PHA Innovation Challenge, Bill shared, "The diversity of the people in this room is striking. And that's great. It's a strength and an opportunity... because the disparity out there is also quite striking."

Julie and Bill have been working together for years and are close friends.

Now the hackers are hard at work, and they will be for a while. Our speakers have proven incredible resources for everyone, as have the ladies from Geeks Without Bounds who have been helping us with facilitation and user-centered thinking.

One of our groups in a team huddle, laptops out.

Another team, storyboarding.

Stay tuned for more on Day 2!