What children eat can influence their learning, mood, behaviour and ability to regulate emotions, making food an important and often overlooked part of whole-school wellbeing.
The Root Cause helps schools explore this connection through fun, practical and evidence-informed experiences. Its flagship Mad Food Science™ Incursion uses hands-on experiments to spark conversations with students and teachers about food, mood, behaviour, learning and the environment.
The Mad Food Science Incursion™
This flagship program, running in Australian schools for over a decade. The Mad Food Science™ Incursion turns food into a fun, hands-on experiment. The incursion sparks conversations about food, health, learning and the environment. Learning comes to life as students learn to taste with their tongue, ask what’s in their food and connect food to everyday, including energy, mood, focus, learning, sleep and wellbeing. The incursion is guided by a Certified Instructor who plans the incursion around your bell times and takes the pressure of your teachers to start these important conversations. The incursion is also paired with a parent and carer information seminar, so the conversation continues at home.
The teacher and parent incursion evaluations consistently show the impact is immediate and memorable. Teachers share words like “such a great interactive experience for our kids! This was great and very informative, even for me as an adult” and parents say words like “This is a great program, and I’m so glad it is offered to both students and parents, so that we can both be on the same page.”
The Mad Food Science Incursion™ is the entry point that gets whole school communities talking about food differently.
The Mad Food Science Incursion™ is delivered in-person (although during Covid, they did deliver remotely). They are a firm believe that the in-person element gets students out of their classrooms into a big space with their peers, and uses positive peer environment to make the key messages more impactful. A typical Mad Food Science™ Incursion sees a Certified Instructor spend a day on-site (or more depending on the number of students), running age-appropriate, hands-on sessions with students followed by an evening parent seminar. The parent seminar can be delivered in-person and online, and is best done as close as possible to when the students hear the messages. This helps put the whole family as one mum said it “on the same page.”
