Ninja Kitchen to the rescue: Evaluation of a food safety education game for middle school youth

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of Ninja Kitchen, a food safety educational video game, on middle school students' food safety knowledge, psychographic characteristics, and usual and intended behaviors.Design/methodology/approach – The experimental group (n=903) completed the following activities about one week apart from each other: pretest, played the game, posttest, and follow‐up test. The control group (n=365) completed the same activities at similar intervals but did not have access to the game until after the follow‐up test.Findings – Linear mixed‐effects models, controlling for gender, grade, and geographic location revealed significant time by group effects for knowledge of safe cooking temperatures for animal proteins and danger zone hazard prevention, and usual produce washing behaviors. Pairwise comparisons, adjusted for multiple comparisons, indicated that after playing the game, the experimental group felt more susceptible to foodborne illness, had stronger attitud...

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