OPTAVIA Healthy Habits Game Design Challenge

Our Goal is to Empower Students through a Virtual Game Design Challenge with support from Game Development Professionals

Whether in school or at home, kids engage in gameplay every single day. They create games on their own as well as with their friends and classmates.  The OPTAVIA Healthy Habits Game Design Challenge seeks to tap into this creative energy and inspire students to design games that build, develop, and encourage healthy habits!

Physical games, whether card, dice, or board, present great opportunities to connect, compete, and learn from others.  In the OPTAVIA Healthy Habits Game Design Challenge, students will engage in a hands-on STEM experience with their friends and classmates by designing their own physical game. The Challenge will encourage learning, computational thinking, and fellowship, as well as many other 21st-century skills.  This virtual experience will enable K-12 students to learn more about game development, healthy habits, and their own creativity!

Click Here to Jump to the Challenge Timeline!

About the Competition

We are excited to provide all learners with an opportunity to design a physical game, no matter their age or previous experience. All students will create a:

• Game Design Document
• Physical Prototype
• Gameplay Video

To assist teachers with integrating this experience into their classroom, lesson plans with templates and handouts for each portion of the OPTAVIA Healthy Habits Game Design Challenge are provided below.  For students participating without a teacher, there will be weekly presentations throughout the months of November and December from Game Development Professionals that correspond to the week’s lesson.

To encourage fellowship and collaboration, students can work independently or in teams of up to 5 people. In order to participate, all students must have their teacher or parent register their team, using the “Sign Up Now!” button below. Teachers and parents are welcome to register multiple teams.  Students must be in kindergarten through 12th grade to participate.  The deadline to register is December 15th, 2021 at 11:59 pm PST.

Any questions regarding the competition can be submitted by email to events@legendsoflearning.com. We look forward to your submissions!

Sign Up Now!

About the Theme: Healthy Habits

As the platinum sponsor of the Healthy Habits Game Design Challenge, OPTAVIA has challenged you to design a physical game that promotes healthy habits. There are countless healthy habits, so we encourage you to think about habits in the context of the Habits of Health. Developed by OPTAVIA co-founder, Dr. Wayne Andersen (Dr. A), the Habits of Health gets your mind and body working together and helps you replace unhealthy habits with healthy ones.  The Habits of Health are simply broken down into macroHabits and microHabits.

macroHabits: The foundations of optimal health and well-being.

• Healthy Eating & Hydration – A focus on portion control, meal frequency, nutrients, eating a balanced diet, and the importance of water and proper hydration.
• Healthy Motion – Formal exercise as well as smaller activities and strategies for moving your body throughout the day.
• Healthy Sleep – Proper sleep as well as focus and productivity.
• Healthy Mind – How you make choices, understand patterns and triggers, and maintain calm and resilient with self-awareness and mindfulness.
• Healthy Surroundings – The people, places and things you surround yourself — which all affect health. Build a “health bubble”, a sense of healthy connections, including a support system and lasting relationships.

microHabits: The building blocks of the Habits of Health in bite-sized pieces.

• Daily, incremental steps that make the behavior easy to do so that, over time, the larger macroHabits are adopted successfully.
• The idea is to take each desired macroHabit and decrease its complexity into a small, doable daily action that fits into a repeated loop.
• Have you heard of the phrase – “Eat an elephant a bite at a time”?  That is a microHabit.

At OPTAVIA,  we believe that everyone should have the access and education to create healthy habits, no matter where you live and how old you are… your games will help us achieve that goal!

Timeline

• October 1st, 2021:  The OPTAVIA Healthy Habits Game Design Challenge will formally open with the posting of the lesson plans for teachers and a parent handout for parents.
  • Lesson Plans Google Document
  • Lesson Plans PDF
  • Parent Handout Google Document
  • Parent Handout PDF

• Week of November 1st:  Opening ceremony, featuring OPTAVIA, exploring our theme of Healthy Habits.  This week will focus on Lesson 1: Game Concept and Planning.
  • November 1st, 4 pm EST: Opening Ceremony with Keynote Speaker, OPTAVIA
    • Access the Presentation Recording Here
  • November 4th, 5 pm EST: Theme and Storytelling in Games, featuring Unexpected Games
    • Access the Presentation Recording Here
• Week of November 8th:  This week will explore Lesson 2: Game Prototyping, accompanied by a presentation from Gamewright.
  • November 9th, 4 pm EST: How to Prototype Your Game
    • Access the Presentation Recording Here
• Week of November 15th:  This week will dive into Lesson 3: Game Development, coupled with a talk by Game Designers from Calliope Games.
  • November 16th, 3 pm EST: Rolling with Change, How to Develop Your Game
    • Access the Presentation Recording Here
• Week of November 22nd:  Enjoy Thanksgiving Break!
  • If you have any questions as you continue to work on your game design, please do not hesitate to reach out to events@legendsoflearning.com.

• Week of November 29th: This week will detail Lesson 4: Game Playtesting and Polish, supplemented by a presentation from a Game Developer at Ravensburger.
  • December 2nd, 4 pm EST: The Pain and Reward of Playtesting!
    • Access the Presentation Recording Here

• December 15th:  All submissions are due by 11:59 pm PST. Submissions must be submitted through this Google Form.  Each submission must consist of:
  • Completed Game Design Document (Google Document or PDF)
  • Up to 5 Game Prototype Photos
  • Gameplay Video

• January 13th:  The winners of the OPTAVIA Healthy Habits Game Design Challenge will be announced at our Closing Ceremony and via email.
  • January 13th, 5 pm EST: Closing Ceremony, featuring OPTAVIA, Legends of Learning, and the winning games!
    • Access the Presentation Recording Here

Winners

The winning teams will be selected by January 13th, 2022.  Each submission timely received and not otherwise disqualified will be scored on the following criteria out of a total of 1000 points:

• Creativity and Theme Integration of Game Design Concept: 0 to 350 points
• Completeness and Detail of Submission: 0 to 350 points
• Originality of Game Mechanics and Gameplay: 0 to 300 points

The two (2) Grand Prize winning teams will each receive a $500 Amazon gift card as well as a premium swag bag with merchandise from our sponsors.  Ten (10) Runner Up winners will each receive a swag bag with a variety of merchandise from our sponsors.

The Grand Prize Winners were:

• Healthgames Studio (Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, TX)
• Magic Marathon (School District of Manatee County, FL)

The Runner Up Winners were:

• A Team (Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, Texas)
• Day One (Johnston County School District, North Carolina)
• Fantastic Four (West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District, New Jersey)
• Funny Bunny (Cupertino Union School District, California)
• Health Is 9000 (Morris School District, New Jersey)
• Healthy Equals Good! (Morris School District, New Jersey)
• Healthy Runners (Toronto District School Board, Canada)
• Survivors of the Healthy (Toronto District School Board, Canada)
• Town Tendencies (Cobb County School District, Georgia)
• UnNecessary (Cobb County School District, Georgia)

The Honorable Mentions were:

• Carrot Guy (Council Bluffs Community Schools, Iowa)
• Fit Fad! (Ephrata Area School District, Pennsylvania)
• Game Force (Toronto District School Board, Canada)
• Healthy Adventures (Wolf Creek Public Schools, Canada)
• Healthy Habits (Ephrata Area School District, Pennsylvania)
• Healthy Helpers (Morris School District, New Jersey)
• lenai and alysha (Cobb County School District, Georgia)
• Lv1 (Bergen County Technical Schools, New Jersey)
• Orange (Hamilton County School District, Tennessee)
• popsicles (Charleston County School District, South Carolina)
• Salubrious High (Charleston County School District, South Carolina)
• Sam and Oscar (Charleston County School District, South Carolina)
• Save Health (New Prague Area Schools, Minnesota)
• Speedrun (North East Independent School District, Texas)
• Team Pineapple (School District of Palm Beach County, Florida)
• Team Team (Toronto District School Board, Canada)
• The Bunsen Burners (Ephrata Area School District, Pennsylvania)
• The Dream Team (Round Rock Christian Academy, Texas)
• The Island Icons (Toronto District School Board, Canada)
• The Low Budget Company (Toronto District School Board, Canada)

A Tremendous Thank You to our Legendary Sponsors!

About Legends of Learning

American children need new education heroes: teachers dedicated to using modern and engaging methods for delivering their curriculum. Legends of Learning helps teachers make classrooms fun and productive learning environments through research-driven curriculum-based games. We use ongoing original research to create a marketplace filled with an epic range of curriculum-based games for stronger subject mastery and classroom engagement.

Currently, over two million US-based students actively use Legends of Learning.  100,000+ teachers in all 50 states use the platform to engage their students in math and science, creating an equitable learning environment where students can use multiple representations to solve problems and progress at their own rate, allowing for differentiation based on student needs. 30,000+ school buildings and 10,000+ unique school districts use our innovative approach to game-based learning as a primary vehicle for instruction to promote problem-solving, reasoning, and discourse in mathematics and science.

About Medifast

This competition is sponsored by a generous grant from Medifast.

Medifast (NYSE: MED) is the global company behind one of the fastest-growing health and wellness communities, OPTAVIA^®, which offers scientifically developed products, clinically proven plans and the support of Coaches and a Community to help Clients achieve Lifelong Transformation, One Healthy Habit at a Time^®. Based on more than 40 years of experience, Medifast has redefined direct selling by combining the best aspects of the model. Its community of independent OPTAVIA Coaches has impacted more than 2 million lives and teaches Clients how to develop holistic healthy habits through the proprietary Habits of Health^® Transformational System. Medifast was recognized in 2020 and 2021 as one of FORTUNE’s 100 Fastest-Growing Companies and was named to Forbes’ 100 Most Trustworthy Companies in America list in 2017. For more information, visit MedifastInc.com or OPTAVIA.com and follow @Medifast on Twitter.

Contact

Questions, comments, or concerns?

Please contact: events@legendsoflearning.com.