Active Learning & Healthy Eating
Educational health materials that needed to work for both children and their parents — two groups with completely different needs. We researched them separately and designed for both.
Educational health materials that needed to work for both children and their parents — two groups with completely different needs. We researched them separately and designed for both.
Left: Observational sessions with children identifying what held attention and what triggered disengagement. Right: Parent interviews mapping the practical and emotional barriers to health education engagement.
The Active Learning & Healthy Eating initiative needed educational materials and a digital experience that would engage both school-age children and their parents around healthy habits. Existing resources — both the initiative's own materials and broader category content — were failing at this consistently. Content aimed at children was either preachy or patronising. Content aimed at parents was dense, heavy on statistics, and competing with every other demand on their attention.
The challenge wasn't just writing for two audiences. It was designing for two fundamentally different relationships with the subject matter — one built on curiosity and play, the other on information and evidence.
We conducted separate research with each audience: observational sessions with children in the target age group, and one-to-one interviews with parents. Running these tracks independently was critical — the presence of parents in children's sessions changes behaviour, and parent interviews needed space for honest reflection without performance.
The findings were distinct on almost every dimension. Children responded to content that felt like a game or a challenge and disengaged immediately from anything that felt instructive or adult-directed. Parents, by contrast, wanted evidence and practicality. They were open to changing their own behaviour but needed to trust the source and be able to act quickly. Neither group was well-served by the kind of compromise content that tried to address both in the same voice.
"The previous materials were written for the adult imagining a child — not for the child who was actually going to use them. We had to separate those two things completely."
We developed two parallel content strategies that shared a coherent visual identity but spoke in genuinely different voices. The children's content was playful, direct, and action-oriented — short challenges rather than lessons, visual-first, no moralising. The parents' content was evidence-grounded, time-efficient, and honest about difficulty, with clear connections between their own engagement and their children's outcomes.
Both content tracks were tested in pilot sessions before finalisation. Children responded positively to the tone and interactive elements; parents found the resources practical, credible, and easier to act on than comparable materials. The project became a reference model for the organisation's future content development.
The finished materials: two content strategies, one coherent design system. Both pilot cohorts responded positively — children and parents engaging on their own terms.
Got a project?
Say hello
