Making asthma education appealing for kids
04/13/17
Last class, after determining that we needed to turn our proposed idea of creating four badges into one badge, we started thinking about the steps girls could complete in order to earn the badge. We still wanted to stick with the idea of body awareness and health, with the end goals of awareness, self-management, and ownership. We further broke this up into five categories to reflect the five steps that it usually takes for a Girl Scout to earn a badge:
- Onboarding exercises/Introduction
- Cognition
- Social and Physical Environment
- Physiology
- Behavior
Through talking to Stacie and obtaining pages from her troop leader binder, we found that there were three options for activities for completing each step towards a badge. Therefore, we each came up with a few activities for each step that girls could do in order to complete the step. We tried to categorize all of the activities we came up with under a specific step that it would fall under. Here are a few that we came up with:
Onboarding exercises — Introduction
- Make a collage of athletes/sports that you like. What do you like about them?
- Play some kind of tag game or physical activity outside
Cognition (good vibes?)
- Go run outside for 10 minutes and pay attention to how your body feels. Pay attention to your breathing.
- Personality quiz?
Social and Physical Environment
- Find/look at flowers; learn about pollen and how it affects allergies.
- Put stickers on asthma/allergy triggers around home or school
- Collage of triggers
Physiology (My body)
- Learn about an athlete that has a physical ailment
- Build a lung model
- Learn about what foods are good and bad for you and why. Learn about eating a balanced meal (cookies can be ok as long as they are in moderation).
- Bring a stuffed animal to a session where they learn about asthma from a doctor. During the activity they can practice on their stuffed animal (other empathy exercises).
Behavior
- Make a plan for what you will be doing every week to stay healthy
- Create an arts and crafts calendar that will keep track of ways that you will stay or be more healthy.
- Find someone in a hospital who is suffering and make cards for them.
- Bake cookies for someone who is in the hospital! Or if we want to be healthy, bring a fruit basket
- Teach someone else about healthy living/regulation
In addition to thinking about activities, we also started thinking about badge names. Stacie told us that girls gravitate towards badges that are either animal or arts/crafts oriented, so we needed to create something that would appeal to our target age group. Below are a few of the names we brainstormed:
Badge names
- Girl Power
- Super Girl
- Like a Girl
- Athlete
- Body Awareness
- Health Queen
- Healthy Hero (might be a thing already)
- Meditation badge
- Mindfulness
- Balanced life
- Heroine Badge
Nonetheless, we still struggled to tie in the names of the badges we thought of with activities. Our TA Francis pointed us to possibly using the structure of the Hero’s Journey for inspiration, where the Girl Scout using our service is the hero and must overcome obstacles to accomplish her goal.
4.14.17
In order to start determining if our ideas were actually relevant to kids in our target age group, I talked to my sister Sasha (who is 8 years old) and asked her if she would be interested in going through our service and about what activities she liked. Although Sasha isn’t a Girl Scout nor does she have asthma, it was good to get a sense of what kids like nowadays. Below were a few 0f my sister’s suggestions:
Hot or Not — What Sasha thinks is cool/lame:
- Tattoos are cool
- Dancing is cool
- Putting stickers on things is ok but not super fun
- Sports related activities are cool, running is cool
- Cooking doesn’t seem that cool
- Science experiments and building things are cool
- Visiting science museum is cool
- Talking to doctor, visiting hospital is not cool
- Favorite badge names: Super Girl or Healthy Hero
