In the Classroom: Fighting Obesity with Games and WGBH.

In “Grocery Run,” the player buys healthy virtual groceries for a virtual restaurant. Another app integrates digital games into a pre-existing Boys & Girls Club playground. A third simulates a scavenger hunt with built-in lessons on obesity.

These were some of the ideas SPH student teams pitched to staff members from WGBH, Boston’s PBS member station, to conclude Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences Monica Wang’s Obesity Epidemic course (SB800).

The April presentations came a month after Jillian Orr, executive producer at the WGBH Educational Foundation in the Children’s Media group, presented some of the games and apps created by the station to promote children’s health.

At the last class of the semester, students pitched their ideas to Orr (via Skype) and her colleagues: Kevin Lesniewicz, senior developer of multimedia content, games, and apps with the WGBH Digital Kids Group; and Hillary Wells, executive producer of children’s programming.

Each presentation ended with questions and feedback from WGBH. “I love the fact you really thought about cultural diversity,” Wells told the team pitching “Grocery Run,” which would let the player choose from a wide selection of cuisines.

“Oh my gosh,” Orr said after the Boys & Girls Club playground proposal, “I’d love to play on one of these playgrounds!”

Lesniewicz agreed: “I like how the real world and the digital go together.”

The last team pitched WICKids, a potential partnership between WGBH and WIC. “We think you have a lot of the same shared goals as WIC,” teammate Alicia Afrah-Boateng told the WGBH guests.

WIC already has an app for adults called WICShopper, helping recipients find products covered by the program. WICKids, Afrah-Boateng and her teammates explained, would be for children in the program, with games to teach them about healthy food and to keep them moving. The app could interface with WICShopper and be used as part of a built-in study monitoring the health of WIC participants.

Orr was impressed.

“You had me at, ‘Oh hey GBH, we want to set you up with WIC’,” she said.

The possibility of seeing a student-designed program come to life on the WGBH Kids website was exciting, Wang said: “There is much more student excitement and motivation to apply skills when the final project could be used in real life.”

Even if that didn’t come to fruition, Wang said, the feedback from the panel was tremendously valuable. “I’m coming from a public health background and providing commentary on the integration of evidence and science in their proposals to target childhood obesity,” she said. “Orr, Wells, and Lesniewicz gave fantastic feedback on implementation and innovation from a public media perspective.”

—Michelle Samuels