The challenge
Hello, I'm Alex Scott. Welcome to Planet Create where your ideas and creativity, help to solve global issues. Today, let’s talk about good health and wellbeing. We can help ourselves stay healthy by eating a varied diet. With lots of fruits and vegetables and drinking lots of water and keeping ourselves active by exercising. We can also help keep our mind healthy by talking to people about things that upset us. Spending time with friends and family and taking care of ourselves, which means playing and resting. We’re really lucky that we live in a country where we can expect now to live for a long time. And this, is called life expectancy.
For a long time there have been many advances in science that have helped people to live for much longer. But these advances are slowing down now and we need to speed them back up. What can we do about it? Well, living a healthy and active lifestyle is essential and promoting that to those around you is a big part of that. So I want to set you a challenge. You’re going to come up with an idea for some equipment or technology to help make your friends and family fitter. So have a think about what you know about healthy diets and lifestyles to help design your innovation.
Can you think of what would motivate you, you your family and friends to get fitter? What technology could you invent that could help make this happen? And how would you create it? Look, no idea is a bad idea. So let's focus and think big with this one and I can't wait to see what you come up with.
Advances in science have helped people live a much longer, healthier life but we’re beginning to see a decline in life expectancy.
So, what can we do to keep that up?
Former footballer and TV Presenter Alex Scott sets pupils the challenge of inventing a piece of equipment or technology to improve health and wellbeing. This challenges ties in with the UN Sustainable Development Goal number 3: Health and Wellbeing.
Teacher notes
Supports learning about: health and wellbeing, physical exercise, effects of sleep, water and exercise on the body, mental health.
So why not enable pupils to take their learning further and come up with some practical solutions?
Classroom ideas
You can adapt ideas to be a quick activity, an entire lesson or develop into a longer topic.
Are we drinking enough water?
Ask pupils to record their water intake over the course of a school day. How much should they be drinking? How can they measure this? How helpful is it to have a reusable water bottle? How could they use this knowledge to design something to encourage others to drink more water each day?
_n.b we need to drink a sensible amount, too much water is as bad as too little.
How can we be more active?
Pupils will be familiar with apps that measure the number of steps we take and how long we’re active for, but can pupils design a new piece of equipment for the playground that would encourage more activity?
Are you OK?
Tell pupils it’s important to share concerns and help each other talk through our worries but how can we do this better? How can technology or new equipment help us do this?
These are just a few examples.
- What are you doing in your curriculum and with which primary age group?
- What ideas have you and your class got to meet Alex’s challenge?
Curriculum links
England
Science, PE, Computing, Design Technology, Citizenship Education.
Northern Ireland
Personal Development and Mutual Understanding, The World Around Us.
Scotland
Health and Wellbeing, Sciences and Technologies.
Wales
Health and Wellbeing, Science and Technology and Humanities.
Where next?
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Backpack challenge with Steven Bartlett
Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Steven Bartlett sets pupils the challenge of making a backpack from recycled materials.
