Proposal

=Design Proposal (in progress) = // (Using framework supplied by Beiyi and MIT class: technologies for creative learning) //

Elevator Speech summary of the project:
A draw-your-own-meals game. You are hosting a dinner party. Each guest has special dietary needs, some are sedentary or on a diet, some have medical conditions like food allergies or high blood pressure. Your job as the chef-artist is to make healthy meals for every guest. You create the meals either by dragging and dropping food clip-art onto each guest's plate, or, you draw each food (and label it with the food name). You also choose the quantity, or how much of each food goes on each plate. While you create the meals, each person's plate will have a nutrition score meter that goes up and down. Click on the nutrition meters to see a breakdown of nutrients on each person's plate; i.e. calories, carbohydrates, fat, protein and vitamins. Do some searching through the glossary to find out about medical conditions of your guests- you want to make sure they don't get sick from eating at your party! When each plate's health meter looks good, serve your food! If your guests don't like the food, or you don't pay attention to nutrition and their medical conditions, they might get sick (and never visit you again). They might also become unhappy or refuse to eat the food. The game will consist several levels, with the task of higher level be serving more guests of different ages and professions, and with various health conditions. In the end, users can also upload their own real guests profiles (e.g. their parents and friends), and construct the food for them by themselves.

Problems/challenges we are addressing
Nutrition, biology and math are not connected in school Lack of motivation for learning STEM topics Lack of contextualization (meaningful themes) Lack of collaboration Lack of creative, open-ended learning
 * Educational Challenges we want to address


Our game will be multidisciplinary and combine nutrition, biology and math. Our game is an open-ended constructionist learning tool. Our game has meaningful themes. Our game motivates users to learn STEM topics. Our game encourages collaboration.
 * Proposed Solutions to Educational Challenges.
 * What activities we want to support:
 * kids tinkering with nutrition, and its relationship to disease, exercise, measurements and daily life
 * they will draw and construct meals, and do nutrition detective work to make healthy meals for people with diverse nutritional needs
 * What we hope people will learn:
 * an intuitive understanding of nutrition and how it impacts health
 * The importance of choosing a variety of food to keep a balanced diet, and the basic information of the nutrition of different food (including junk food)
 * they will be empowered: to cook/prepare food for others, and to do it in a way that can help loved ones suffering from disease
 * an understanding of proportions, measurements and quantity (i.e. by measuring food, measuring calories, protein, effects of exercise..)
 * benevolence and consideration of other people's (nutritional/health) needs

Existing Approaches

 * What's already out there:
 * Nourish Interactive's Repository of Online Food Games
 * Crayon Physics (interactive drawing game)
 * How existing approaches inform our work:
 * they inform our gameplay mechanics (i.e. how to calculate food scores, how to win and lose, incentives to keep playing)
 * how to categorize food
 * user interface
 * How are existing approaches lacking:
 * not constructive or constructionist in approach
 * not customizable / personable
 * does not support endless combinations and curiosity
 * not engaging enough
 * not enough contextualization
 * not enough scaffolding (i.e. video tutorials to guide students and suggest interesting uses of the tool)

Design principles/rationale

 * What guides our design?
 * something intuitive and accessible to use (easy / low floor)
 * something that still lets people do lots of complicated activities (powerful / high ceiling)
 * supports multiple learning styles (can draw food, can drag and drop food, can analyze and break down food scores or just 'tinker' with putting different food on plates and watching the meter go up and down)
 * engages users in thinking about important concepts (food, health, math and hosting dinners..)
 * fosters creative expression
 * fosters benevolence
 * encourages adopting identity of a chef, nutritionist, health scientist, host (empowering kids to assume these more adult roles)

Design

 * Design constraints?
 * time: we have one semester
 * technical ability: we don't know much programming
 * Design process: how it is evolving
 * Description of key features
 * food-drawing chef's kitchen interface
 * the dinner table with guests that have different health and nutritional requirements
 * a changing health meter that provides constant, real-time feedback on each plate's nutrition score
 * a page that links from this health meter giving a detailed breakdown of the nutritional contents of each plate (i.e. calories, protein, fat, fiber, vitamins etc..)
 * a wiki or glossary with information on medical conditions and nutrition of each food
 * How this tool highlights nutrition, health, how it fosters learning-by-doing and creativity
 * students can construct and draw meals for people according to their health status and individual nutritional needs
 * supports almost endless combinations of foods, and creativity (students have the option of drawing their food)

Scenarios

 * Provide concrete example(s) of how this tool will be used by people
 * Discuss what these students will learn when they use this tool

Evaluation

 * We should test this tool on users
 * What did this testing tell us about the usability?
 * What did testers learn?

Future Directions

 * How can we improve our learning tool?
 * students can construct dinner party guests or 'challenges' for their friends
 * can play on teams against each other (team chef competitions, like Iron Chef?)
 * have an online collaborative forum
 * Suggest next steps

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