This project was commissioned to better understand the opportunities to improve attitudes to vegetables amongst children aged 8-12 and to develop digital classroom resources that support vegetable education.

While parents are the gatekeepers to child vegetable consumption, primary school teachers are uniquely placed to integrate vegetable education into their classrooms, if they’re provided with accessible solutions that fulfil their curriculum requirements – across subject areas of science and technology, English, the Arts, Health and PE, Maths and Humanities – with minimal demand for extra skills or time.

This pilot project was divided into three parts: research, development, and implementation.

Through these stages of work, the project delivered:

  • 25 webisodes, or online videos, embedded on a dedicated project website
  • 50 downloadable PDF teaching resources for teachers of children ages 8-12 (years 3-6), consisting of activities and capsule lesson plans, with each resource linked to at least one of the webisodes
  • A dedicated website (http://www.phenomenom.com.au) to house the above outputs
  • One long-form summary episode designed for inflight entertainment and screened on the Qantas inflight platform

Overall, this project designed and developed an innovative prototype for how vegetable education can be delivered by teachers, without special training or equipment, across multiple curriculum areas.

As a result of this work, the project confirmed an appetite amongst the media, public and industry for new approaches to (and alternative avenues for) improving attitudes to vegetables in children.