Now fortified and enriched.

When we heard that the USDA and the White House were holding a health games competition, we knew our name was written all over it. After all, Pyramid Pile Up was already using USDA databases and information from their MyPyramid website.  Because it’s a competition, we decided to give Pyramid Pile Up a slight makeover.

Introducing Pyramid Pile Up Plus!

Pyramid Pile Up Plus is a puzzle game many of you may be familiar with.  As with Pyramid Pile Up, you play against the Chompies to fill up a pyramid of healthy foods.  What makes Pyramid Pile Up Plus a “plus” is two-fold:

• Pyramid Pile Up Plus delivers health information to players using two USDA databases, FNDDS 3.0 and MyFoodapedia.
• Starting in level 2, scrolling over food tiles reveals nutrition labels.  Now it’s even easier to make healthier choices by choosing foods that are low in fat, saturated fat, and sugar.
• Pyramid Pile Up Plus is available in both English and Spanish.  ¡Olé!

Wow!  So fun!  You’ll only find Pyramid Pile Up Plus for this competition so play now or watch the video. You can vote for your favorite healthy kid app and game starting July 14.  We hope you enjoy Pyramid Pile Up Plus and want to vote for Playnormous!

About the Apps for Healthy Kids Competition.

The Apps for Healthy Kids competition is a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation. Apps for Healthy Kids challenges software developers, game designers, students, and other innovators to develop fun and engaging software tools and games that drive children, especially “tweens” (ages 9-12) – directly or through their parents – to eat better and be more physically active. Tools and games should be built using the USDA nutrition dataset recently made available to the public through the Open Government Initiative.

Hot, hot, hot!

Can you believe that summer is already here?  For those of you sweating it out already due to high temperatures, we will kindly accept “Duh!” as a great response. Regardless, summer starting means school ending and that means the conclusion of our 2009/2010 Monster iMac Giveaway!

We could not be more pleased with the amazing entries we received during our year long Monster iMac Giveaway.  What an amazing opportunity to give away ten computers to ten well-deserving homes.

For those of you that were too busy working or studying to pay attention to our contest, here’s the 411.  Basically we wanted to give hand-illustrated iMacs to teachers, librarians, and students that are getting healthy the monster way by using Playnormous.  We challenged teachers and librarians around the country to send in their Playnormous stories through blogging, essay writing, photos, and video.  The response was…well…beyond our wildest expectations.

And the winner is…

What this contest taught me is that there are some amazing teachers and librarians out there that are making a huge difference in the lives of kids.  Just check out some of the amazing things our winners did to teach their students about health:

• Broadcast a student-led “Nutrition 101″ news story using health knowledge learned from Playnormous.com.
• Plant a class garden of fruits and vegetables seen in Lunch Crunch.
• Healthy snack challenge to eat healthier snacks at school and home like those seen in Pyramid Pile Up.
• Have a veggie grill out on the school patio.
• Create a healthy foods animation with Animoto.
• Design a lunch activity center and choose from healthy and unhealthy play foods.
• Play online Playnormous health games with a dance pad like the FootPOWR pad from Footgaming.

Please join me in extending a monstrously large “Congratulations” to all of our amazing winners!