Food Standards Scotland (FSS) wanted to deliver important messages on healthy eating and safe cooking in a way that could capture attention at the busy Royal Highland Show. Their dream was to inspire families – especially children – to make smarter food choices through play.
In partnership with Speakeasy, FSS asked Ping Creates to design a suite of educational games that would transform complex public health guidance into fun, memorable digital experiences.
The Challenge
Traditional public health messaging often struggles to hold attention, especially at busy events like the Royal Highland Show. FSS needed a set of games that could:
- Deliver food safety and nutrition messages quickly and clearly.
- Engage diverse audiences, especially children and families.
- Run smoothly on touchscreens and event-based hardware
- Be visually appealing, intuitive and replayable.
The challenge was to combine serious educational content with gameplay that was entertaining and easy to pick up within seconds.
Our Approach
At Ping Creates, we love merging design, technology and storytelling to drive engagement. For FSS, we built four custom games, each with its own educational focus and gameplay style.
We began with workshops involving FSS’s marketing and food hygiene teams to define objectives and messages. From there, our designers and developers produced interactive prototypes to playtest our game ideas. We then moved on to full development, including animated interfaces and attractor screens that would grab the attention of passers-by.
Each game was designed to communicate a distinct behaviour change:
- Balance Your Basket: Players used a tablet to scan QR codes on a range of supermarket foods. The interface dynamically updated based on the selected foods, encouraging players to build a healthy, balanced shopping basket and increasing nutritional awareness.
- Chicken Checker: A virtual BBQ simulator that challenged players to cook chicken thoroughly and safely without causing contamination or risking food poisoning. With real-time temperature controls and visual depictions of the various cooking stages, it taught the importance of food hygiene in an entertaining, hands-on way.
- Snack Attack: A fast-paced reflex game that reinforced the dangers of excessive snacking. Players raced against the clock to clear fatty, sugary and salty foods from the board… and lost points by clearing healthy foods.
- Food Chain: A multiple-choice quiz in which players advanced across the board by answering questions on Food Standard Scotland’s role in the supply chain.
The Solution
Combining vibrant design and intuitive gameplay, the games were perfectly suited for large-scale public events. Deployed on touchscreen tablets and integrated into physical event displays – including a real BBQ setup for Chicken Checker – they delivered a colourful, immersive, mixed-media experience.
The unified visual identity across all games reflected FSS’s brand and campaign messaging, ensuring consistency across educational and promotional materials.
Impact
The project was a huge success. The interactive stand drew long queues of participants eager to compete for the title of Chicken Checker Champion. Engagement exceeded expectations, and the campaign went on to win an EVENTIT Award for Best Interactives.
Following the Royal Highland Show success, FSS continued collaborating with Ping Creates on subsequent campaigns, including new interactive games designed to promote physical activity and healthy lifestyles.
For FSS, these games demonstrated the effectiveness of gamification in public health education. For Ping Creates, it was another opportunity to use creativity and play to promote positive habits – inspired by dreams of a smarter, healthier world.
Dreaming of an interactive game that educates and inspires?
