New Healthy Eating Game For Kids Needs Your Help

Hello Sweet Potato game image provided.

A Cambridge artist and grandmother wants to change the way kids think about food, and her clever game could be the answer to getting kids to eat healthier. But she needs our help.

Barbara Movius created Hello Sweet Potato, which are kids games and activity kits designed to help meet the challenge of getting kids to eat healthy. “Each game has a new take on a classic card game,” Movius says. “It has a modern story featuring an engaging child character and a pretend play mat.”

With just over a week to go, Cambridge based Hello Sweet Potato needs the community’s help to make the game a reality. Movius launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund production.

Photo provided.

The games are more than kids card games. “It could be the bridge between having fun and developing healthy eating habits for life,” Movius says. “Feeding your kids in a healthy way can be a daily challenge for parents. I started to become really aware of the challenges facing parents raising kids with a busy life. When I created Hello Sweet Potato I thought that if children became more familiar with the kinds of foods that we think are healthy and more desirable, then they will be more willing to eat them… and try them.”

All the games in the series involve food, fun with friends, and teaching skills. A few of the games include:

Go Fresh Salad:

So why Kickstarter? Movius says that the entire effort was a community collaboration. “Kickstarter is community effort, and from the beginning sweet potato was a collaboration,” she says. “We collaborate with artists. The [money we need] is to bring the games to a wider audience, and will go directly to production. It’s all made in the USA.”

Movius wrote a featured post on Maria Shriver’s blog where she explains her initial motivation:

Initially I created the Hello Sweet Potato games and stories with my grandchildren in mind because they were growing up in an increasingly busy world—both for themselves and their parents—who were trying to make sure their kids were getting the best start. I wrote about things I saw on visits when we went to the neighborhood playground, gym class, or picked up dinner…ordinary things that meant a lot to me.

I suddenly realized Hello Sweet Potato games could help other parents educate their children by tying in real-life experiences like food shopping and meal making, creating opportunities for imaginative play and a great starting point for teaching healthy activities for healthy living. Having beautifully designed things around to hold and play with couldn’t hurt, so I collaborated with other artists and photographers to add variety, different perspectives and strengths to build what became Hello Sweet Potato.

Of all the Kickstarter campaigns I’ve seen, the production quality on the Hello Sweet Potato video is the most professional. You can check it out here.