It’s hard enough keeping lockdown boredom at bay as an adult, never mind if you’re a kid (or if you have one!). . . We teamed up with our charity partner, the Mintridge Foundation, to create Minty’s Boredom Busters game.
Believe it or not, we started work on this Nibble Protein/ Mintridge Foundation wellness game long before the lockdown. We wanted to find a way to continue the great outreach work that The Mintridge Foundation does to encourage wellness, particularly sports participation, in kids. As a registered charity, The Mintridge Foundation runs programmes with pro athletes (including an amazing roster of Olympians and Paralympians), mentoring and training youths (ages 4-18) to help get them into sport. As Mintridge’s official Nutrition Partner, Nibble is on a mission to help instil healthy eating habits from a young age.
Nibble founder, Erin, had the idea to create an activities-based game that would hopefully encourage young kids to continue good wellness habits after their Mintridge visits. Working with Mintridge Foundation’s Patrick Latham (cricketer, tutor, and talented illustrator and caricature artist), the plan was to create a wellness game board that included a list of challenges, both sport and nutrition-based. Incentivising the kids to participate, prizes would be available for the best submitted entries. We hoped the game would hang on the fridge to engage the whole family.
The activities included challenges that encouraged kids to eat a range of different coloured fruit and veg during a week, giving points for each portion eaten. There were also more traditional athletic activities, like running challenges.
This game was in development for a while (thank you, Patrick, for putting in all the hard yards!) but we never quite finished it. Then COVID-19 came along, and the world was suddenly put in lock-down—with a lot of bored children about—and there was no better time to launch it.
We quickly adapted the game to fit the current constraints, bearing in mind that a lot of kids are stuck indoors without any access to an outdoor space. We also ensured that the sheets were almost entirely black and white so they more home printer-friendly. This enabled us to add another dimension to the game by turning it into a mini colouring book. Morphing the game into Minty’s Boredom Busters, we’ve included activities that covered sport, nutrition, mental health, art/creativity, and even a little maths (those scores don’t count themselves!).
We’ve even added a challenge to help kids visualise 2 metres as a measurement to hopefully encourage safe social distancing. The “2m Hunt” challenges kids to search for objects in the house or garden that are either 2m wide or tall.
Check mintridgefoundation.org.uk to see videos of Mintridge Ambassadors and other athletes performing the activities and learn how to submit the game for prizes!
