Teaching Youth Food Safety – A Game-Based Experience

Youth are the next generation of food handlers—they will prepare food for themselves and their families, and may also end up working in the food industry. It’s especially important that they learn how to handle, cook, and store food safely and how to know when food is not safe to eat. But food safety is not an intrinsically exciting topic for youth, so the Learning Games Lab at New Mexico State University developed Theme Park Kitchen, an online learning game that teaches youth food safety practices in engaging ways. The game is a redesign of “Ninja Kitchen,” launched in 2011 to teach kids food handling skills. This publication describes how we developed the game through a design process that articulated the proper steps of safe food handling. This publication also can help Extension agents and other educators use this game in formal and informal educational settings.

This work is supported by New Technologies for Agriculture Extension grant no. 2020-41595-30123 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.