For the second year in a row, 5th Gear Kids worked with Relish Studio to develop the program’s website, one geared toward 5th-grade students in the Cherry Creek and Aurora, Colorado school districts. As a program for students, “5th Gear Kids was designed to provide greater access to physical activity and healthy eating opportunities, and to increase the desirability among 5th graders to participate in healthy lifestyles.” As a website development project, there were unique requirements that needed to be addressed:
- Parental approval for students under 13-years old who registered on the website
- Integration of points earned from shopping at a regional supermarket
- Integration of coupons that were given to children, redeemable for points on the website
- Online surveys and challenges for children to participate in
- A prizes section where children could “purchase” prizes on the website with points they earned
Relish Studio created the original 2012-13 website in Drupal and, after some preliminary research for the 2013-14 school-year website needs, we decided that Drupal was still a solid platform due to the functionality inherit to the CMS, and the wide range of modules we could use.
The availability of modules and the extendable nature of Drupal allowed us to deliver a lot of functionality for the website while keeping costs to a minimum. We used Ubercart and a couple of user-points modules as the basis for the prizes shopping functionality and the user points tracking. In house, we developed the custom registration process, coupon management and redemption, and a few other custom modules to tie everything together into a seamless experience.
As of writing, there are over 6000 registered 5th graders, with a combined 3,064,037 points earned from health-conscious shopping at the regional supermarket, and 137,100 points in redeemed coupons.
