Young people generate ideas for tackling childhood obesity
More than 60 young people from across London attended our Healthy London Hackathon at City Hall on Saturday 28 January.
The 14-17 year-olds discussed how London makes it harder to be healthy, brainstormed ideas for making London healthier for children and young people, and then worked in teams to develop their favourite ideas.
Ideas included making healthy food cheaper and more accessible than fast and unhealthy foods , helping parents to focus on home cooking, educating children to understand what healthy foods are and how to cook them in primary schools, making PE more enjoyable, combining PE with other subjects, and focusing on fast food shops that recycle oil.
Each team created a short video of their idea and these were presented at the end of the day and prizes awarded for the best ideas.
Team Candi won for the overall award for their idea of a school-based competition where parents and children create healthy recipes which would be uploaded on to the school’s website once a month and judged on creativity, nutritional value and taste.
The People’s Choice award, voted for by the young people themselves, went to Team Fruition, who focused on how young people could motivate each other to exercise and enjoy physical activity with their friends.
The hackathon judging panel included a representative from London Sport, from Waltham Forest young advisors and Healthy London Partnership.
The event included presentations from young people from Acland Burghley School in Camden who talked about how they had championed a water only policy in their school. Young advisors from Waltham Forest presented a film they had made for the Great Weight Debate. Born Barikor, CEO and founder of OurParks.co.uk also took questions from young people on the best ways to get healthy living messages out into their communities.
The hackathon was held as part of the London’s Great Weight Debate which aimed to raise awareness of the scale of the childhood obesity epidemic and find out from Londoners what changes they think will help children and young people lead healthier lives.