Obama admin. drops $1.2 million for anti-obesity video games

Via Judicial Watch:

The Obama administration’s obsession with childhood obesity appears to have reached a new level with a $1.2 million government grant to help middle school students create fitness video games known as“exergames.”

The National Science Foundation recently gave researchers at a public university in Indiana the money to tackle two national challenges; increasing children’s interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and decreasing childhood obesity. So the academics have combined the two by parlaying kids’ innate interest in video games and solving big problems to inspire them to gain STEM skills needed to create technology-based fitness games. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

Students will be encouraged to create “exergames” that require players to get up and move, according to the announcement released by the university, a known world-class research institution. Getting young gamers more active can help reduce rampant childhood obesity in the United States, says the team of technology researchers. “We looked at existing systems like Dance Dance Revolution and Wii Fit and wondered how we could use something similar to get kids excited about our academic fields,” says one of the professors in charge of the project.