Fun and Healthy Every Day: using a website as an educational tool to promote health in school children

A sedentary lifestyle and poor nutrition in childhood contribute to increasing levels of poor health among the population. This study aimed to develop a website as a pedagogical tool for health promotion in schoolchildren. Therefore, a total of 39 eutrophic schoolchildren were recruited (22 girls and 17 boys), from 2nd and 5th grades of elementary school (8-10yr), from both public (61.5%) and private (38.5%) schools. Children accessed the TODDS Kids (Fun and Healthy Every Day) website for 1 hour, which was built in HTML5 format on the Wix platform. The participants answered a questionnaire to assess their perception of the site and its content. It was observed that 97.4% of children said they would like to access the site again, and all of them said they would indicate the site to a friend. Scores between 9.14 and 9.56 were attributed to colours, images and information presented on the website. 92.3% and 87.2% reported they intended to be more active and to eat healthier foods after accessing the website, respectively. In conclusion, TODDS Kids website was a well-accepted tool, helping kids to raise awareness about healthier choices and could be used as a pedagogical tool for supporting child health promotion.