Check out http://www.appsforhealthykids.com is a contest in part by the First Lady’s Let’s Move It campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation.  Since I probably won’t have time to work on it, I thought it might be fun to at least brainstorm ideas for mobile apps for kids (obese kids shouldn’t really be sitting at a computer to get healthy).  I think a good way to address the problem is to teach the kids/parents about how many calories things are.  Here are a handful of ideas:

virtual pet – teach kids about health through a game.  the more the kids feed the pet, the fatter it gets till it gets sick.  have the pet require the kid to move the phone in patterns to give the pet exercise to burn of calories from the food the pet eats.

guilt trip – let the parents enter in how much what’ their feeding their kids.  tell them the life span of their kid if they continued to feed the kid the same thing for X years.

location based gaming -  have the kids enter what they ate – they’re given a total # of calories they’ve consumed for the day.  based on the calories they’ve consumed, the kids need to perform location based tasks that force them to check in at several places in a very short amount of time… leading to some calorie loss.  the fewer calories they eat, the fewer places they need to check in to.

that was fun!  im not sure any of these are actually good ideas or not, but it was fun to brainstorm!  if anyone has comments on them, please leave them in the comments so we can discuss!