1. At your convenience you enter the name of a food item you have eaten. The system makes suggestions as you type, drawing from the USDA Nutrition Datase tof foods. You then select your portion size.
2. Your food's nutritional content is calculated, and you are shown a summary of the saturated fats, added sugars, etc. You are given links to information from MyPyramid.gov. The calculated nutritional attributes are run through a set of rules. You gain or lose action points accordingly. For example your food choice may lose you a point for being high in added sugar, while earning you two points for having whole grains. You are given explanations for any changes to your score.
3. You can then answer questions related to your specific food choice. These earn you knowledge points.
4. You can monitor progress with a dynamic graph of your scores over time.
5. You can add other users of the site as friends. If they are not a current user they receive an email invitation. Friends can see each other's current point scores.
6. You can post comments for your friends to see. These can be short announcements, ideas, or observations; and earn you more knowledge points.

The target groups for the Kids Rise Up application are tweens and teenagers. The app is designed as a mobile web site but it also works on desktops and laptops.

Mobile Devices among Youth
Pew Research reported on Teens and Mobile Phones, which surveyed teens in September 2009. It demonstrates the growth of mobile phones; for example, most 12 year-old Americans now have mobile phones. Here is the report's overview.

Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months, from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008 to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And it's not just frequency -- teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting -- averaging 20 messages per day.

Text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group. However, voice calling is still the preferred mode for reaching parents for most teens. [source]

The mobile arena, in addition to its rapid growth, has another important trend. Mobile phone adoption could transcend socioeconomic boundaries. African Americans, for example, have a higher adoption of mobile phones than American whites (even though desktop and laptop use is lower). [source]

African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet -- and their use of it is also growing the fastest. This means the digital divide between African Americans and white Americans diminishes when mobile use is taken into account. [source]

Education and Health Disparities
Health disparities between socioeconomic groups is a serious problem. Although there has been progress in reducing disparities, the problem persists. For example, childhood obesity is more prevalent among lower income families (see the Healthy People 2010 sheet and the CDC report on 1999-2004 data).

The solution to disparities seems to require several efforts working in tandem. The Obama administration has legislated to increase health care access and to stimulate the economy. The approach that we take in this project, however, is that of education. We all know that education adds potential for overcoming disadvantages. So let's apply this to health promotion. And Information and Communication Technologies help in our endeavor: the power of mobile phones to transcend barriers, for example, is discussed on the previous tab. Innovative systems for health education are more powerful than ever for penetrating underserved communities.

Monitoring and Evaluation
For Kids Rise Up, like other health and education projects, we will measure effectiveness not by its popularity, but by evaluating behaviors and health outcomes.

Data Sources for the Kids Rise Up Application
Data about nutritional content of foods is from the USDA Nutrition Dataset. Nutritional scoring ("action points") and questions (for "knowledge points") are based on information on MyPyramid.gov.

Kids Rise Up is a project of Big Yellow Star; please see the Big Yellow Star: About page.

Kids Rise Up is a designed for mobiles, but it also works on desktops and laptops if you use a WebKit-enabled browser. Click the tab for the system you want to use.

• Safari is the browser made by Apple but it runs on Windows. Download Safari here.
• Chrome is the web browser made by Google, and it is very quick and easy to install and use. Download Chrome here.

Safari (the normal Mac browser) works fine. If you have any trouble please try downloading the latest Safari.

This app was designed for the mobile Safari browser: Phone, iPod Touch, and iPad.