Get in the GROOVE!

描述（由申请人提供）：进入沟槽将解决影响服务不足的青年的健康差距，以及国家需要培养下一代卫生专业人员的多样性。鉴于高中少数民族青年超重和肥胖的比例令人震惊，该项目将把重点放在中学，主要目标是在不健康的习惯根深蒂固之前帮助中学女生。 该项目将研究界和非正规科学教育界聚集在一起，以创新的方式努力充实关于非正规学习环境作为向不同人群传播关键健康信息的一个交付系统的影响的知识库，并探索使用虚拟世界技术作为激发学习健康饮食和体育活动如何影响个人健康的兴趣的工具在生活中。 具体目标是：1）为中学生开发科学丰富的健康教育资源，激发他们采取健康生活方式的兴趣; 2）提高中学生对营养和生理学相关的STEM职业道路的认识和兴趣; 3）在家庭文化背景下提高父母对良好营养和体育活动对儿童健康重要性的认识;（4）通过随机对照试验，考察在非正式博物馆环境中探索的三维虚拟世界环境在多大程度上提高了中学生的自我效能感、健康知识和积极行为改变的准备程度; 5）向全球卫生界广泛传播评估的项目成果和研究成果，非正式科学教育和K-12研究社区。 评估计划将记录GROOVE计划的影响，让学生参与营养和体育活动的研究，并提高他们对营养和活动对整体健康重要性的概念性理解。如果成功，这种方法将通过严格评估虚拟世界模拟作为学习工具的使用来推进该领域，有助于非正式教育环境的影响和价值的研究基础，以服务于代表性不足的青年，并可以通过同时激发对科学的兴趣来改变科学教育，同时促进青年的健康行为。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Get in the GROOVE will address health disparities impacting underserved youth, as well as the national need to cultivate diversity in preparing the next generation of health professionals. Given the alarming rate of overweight and obesity among high school minority youth, the project will focus on middle school with the primary aim of reaching middle school girls before unhealthy habits become firmly ingrained. The project brings together the research and informal science education community in an innovative effort to contribute to the knowledge base with regard to the impact of informal learning environments as a delivery system for communicating key health messages to diverse populations, and explore the use of virtual world technology as a vehicle for motivating interest in learning how a healthy diet and physical activity can impact an individual's wellbeing throughout life. The specific objectives are to: 1) to develop science-rich health education resources for middle school students that motivate interest in adopting a healthy lifestyle; 2) to increase middle school students' awareness of and interest in nutrition and physiology related STEM career pathways; 3) increase parental awareness, within the family cultural context, of the importance of good nutrition and physical activity for children's health; 4) to investigate, in a randomized controlled trial, the extent to which a 3-D virtual world environment explored in an informal museum setting produces gains in middle school students' self-efficacy, health knowledge, and readiness for positive behavior change; and 5) to broadly disseminate the evaluated program results and research findings to the global community of health, informal science education and K-12 research communities. The evaluation plan will document the impact of the GROOVE program to engage students in the study of nutrition and physical activity and enhance their conceptual understanding of the importance of nutrition and activity to their overall health. If successful, this approach will advance the field through rigorous evaluation of the use of virtual world simulations as a learning tool, contribute to the research base of the impact and the value of informal education environments to serve underrepresented youth, and could transform science education by simultaneously stimulating interest in science while promoting healthy behavior in youth.