WGBH launches the ARTHUR Family Health at pbskids.org/arthur/health with a rich repository of videos, stories, interactive features, games and quizzes. With this new site, ARTHUR Family Health tackles issues from ARTHUR episodes that explore asthma, peanut allergies, nutrition, fitness, and resilience.
Each of those episodes is available to stream at the ARTHUR Family Health and includes “Buster’s Breathless” which takes viewers inside Buster’s lungs to explain asthma and dispel its myths.
Also available is ARTHUR’s “April 9th” episode, the cornerstone of our Resilience feature. An analogy for the events of September 11, 2001, this story shows the impact of a fire at Arthur’s school. The Resilience feature includes a read-aloud story, with conversation starter questions for adults to discuss with children and an interview with the programs’ adviser on this difficult topic, Dr. Paula Rauch.
Dr. Rauch is the director of PACT, Parenting at a Difficult Time at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital and is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. She and other public health professionals are featured on this new site in Q and A videos. With the anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombings fast approaching, WGBH hopes this site will be a valuable resource for parents or teachers that want to talk about the images and issues which will soon be flooding our media again.
Each section of the ARTHUR Family Health site also contains interactive content. Kids can play a Lung Defender arcade game that shows how the lungs function during an asthma attack. They can find a get-up-and-dance fitness game and two nutrition games, one for younger kids, one for older. For the Resilience feature, a digital tool allows them to draw their feelings.
The Peanut Allergies feature explores Binky’s peanut allergy. It includes a digital gizmo that offers fourteen different language translations of “I have a peanut allergy” to give peace of mind to allergy sufferers traveling to areas where English is not spoken.
And each feature contains additional resources for parents, and all adviser-approved. These supporting materials include trusted web resources, printable activities, tips for kids and parents, and brand new live-action videos that help explain and normalize these difficult issues.
This entire resource is free and optimized to work on mobile devices. It is also designed to be expandable and WGBH will be adding new sections that extend ARTHUR’s rich eighteen-year history tackling tricky topics and making them understandable for kids and their caregivers.
The Arthur Family Health Website is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, which only your healthcare provider can do. Funding for the Arthur Family Health Website is provided by the WGBH Children’s Educational Media Fund, whose donors include The Weezie Foundation.
You can find the ARTHUR Family Health awesome team here.
Digital Things! 