Great Ormond Street

Earlier in 2009, we started on a partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital to support them on a new initiative – to help encourage 11-16 year-olds to take more physical exercise. We decided to make it our pro bono project for 2009, offering our services for free to help develop both e-learning and an engaging Moodle site.

Challenge

The UK government has set a target of one hour of physical exercise every day for 11-16 year-olds. Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) took up the challenge of supporting this goal, with Kineo’s support.

Children First for Health (CFfH) is a general health information resource with age category sections for young users of all ages and parents. Run by GOSH, the site supports GOSH’s public health strategy of encouraging young people to lead ‘healthy and active’ lifestyles through health education and awareness.

GOSH made the decision to extend CFfH to help address the government’s challenging target. GOSH and Kineo started working together on a creative approach to get the message across to this demanding and extremely media-savvy audience.

Approach

Our work together started with a series of sessions with target users to understand current views and attitudes towards fitness and exercise, to ensure that the approach would work for the audience.

Our goal was to have a range of short, focused resources rather than a single long course – we wanted people to be able to dip in and out of the resources and come back time and again.

Kineo created a customised version of Moodle, the open source LMS, to act as an engaging portal for the GET FIT resource. Our graphic artists really enjoyed showing how far you can take the look and feel of Moodle, as you can see here:

Within the site there is a wide range of different resources.

It includes engaging e-learning resources which show the benefits of physical exercise and motivate young people to try different activities. There’s an ‘educate me’ section which explains how the body reacts to exercise and uses a timeline technique to show what can happen if you don’t take care of your body:

Once the audience is attuned to the benefits of exercise, the site can help them think about the different exercise options available. Here’s a screenshot showing the ‘top trumps’ approach we took to exploring different potential physical activities:

One of the key lessons we learned from talking to the target audience was the value of hearing from celebrities, including sports stars, talking about what they do to stay fit. The site therefore includes a range of podcasts and interviews with celebrities:

To help the audience put it all into practice, we created ‘me and my time’, an interactive diary tool to help young people plan and keep track of their physical activity:

The site will be updated in early 2010 with a full teacher’s section, helping PE and PSHE teachers to put the resources into practice in schools.

Results

GET FIT went live in December 2009, but already interest is surging. The promotional video that we produced has received over 6,000 hits on YouTube in the first week of the site being live. You can see it here.

GET FIT will engage its target audience and change their behaviour and understanding of health and exercise, in line with the national curriculum and Healthy School’s programme.

Marcella McEvoy of GOSH said: "The new GET FIT learning dimension will play a key role in supporting our overall strategy to promote the benefits of physical activity, and encourage more young people to participate in sport. We are very grateful to Kineo for their generous support, creative input and dedication to this pilot project."

We at Kineo are immensely proud of our partnership with GOSH on this project. From the feedback so far, we believe the e-learning and Moodle design will really help young people achieve exercise goals.