NTAE: Leveling Up Feature Story

“Theme Park Cafe” is a food safety game for youth created by a team from the New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab. In the game, players engage in different themed kitchens to serve delicious and safe meals to clients. It’s a redesign of “Ninja Kitchen,” launched in 2011 to teach kids food handling skills. In this publication, the game designers talk about increasing the game’s cultural sensitivity, working with kids to create the reboot, and other elements of using gamification to teach educational content.

The publication is excerpted from the New Technologies for Ag Extension 2022-2023 Yearbook, which documents dozens of projects funded through the New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE) program. NTAE is a cooperative agreement between USDA NIFA, Oklahoma State University, and the Extension Foundation. The goal of the New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE) grant is to incubate, accelerate, and expand promising work that will increase the impact of the Cooperative Extension System (CES) in the communities it serves, and provide models that can be adopted or adapted by Extension teams across the nation.