The role of games and history at children's and teens development for the construction of knowledge about healthy eating habits and physical activity

• Grant number: 11/11434-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2011
• End date: August 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine
• Principal Investigator: Cristiane Kochi
• Grantee: Aryane Pereira Neves Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Médicas da Santa Casa de São Paulo (FCMSCSP). Fundação Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Introduction: playing games and group activities are as important to children as psychomotor coordination training. This is the way they start learning and build imaginative processes as well as them appropriate social functions and behavioral norms. The school is an environment where social relationships are broadened and it is known as a privileged place for games achievements. Through games, children are given the opportunity to build concepts from their own accumulated experiences. Games exert, mainly, recreational and educational functions. This last is the resource to reach children and adolescents, introjecting concepts and knowledge into action-oriented and directed. They foment the good command of communication, making easier self-expression, encouraging intellectual development by attention exercising and progressive use of complex thought processes and they stimulate the imagination. Objective: evaluate the role of games in children's knowledge, highlighting the relevance and games practicality as an educational resource, introjecting concepts of balanced diet and exercising, measuring how their nutrition is. Material and methods: Games, comic books, not flexible tape measure, bio impedance weighing-machine, stadiometer and questionnaire. A questionnaire will be applied asking about children's nutrition and physical activity. Games and one comic book with concepts of good nutritional habits and exercising will also be distributed. Anthropometric measures will be collected concurrently with them. At the end of the process, we will return to the schools and deliver new questionnaires to measure the impact of the material that was given in the children habits. We hope to collect measures of 10 000 children. (AU)