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Great Food! Great Health!

Focus area: Health Studies
Audience: 12-18 years
Software application: HTML, Flash and XML

The Good Food, Great Health interactives are fun to use, interesting and informative, and relevant to student nutrition today. The student is encouraged to assess and measure their own daily diet against the Recommended Daily Intake (RDI), and discover the importance of good nutrition and a balanced diet to maintaining a healthy body. The interactives provide the student with opportunities to learn about energy values of food, the link between poor nutrition and disease, and how to construct and apply a healthy diet to their own lifestyle.

The sample tasks provide students with an opportunity to build on their current knowledge (Bruner), to test what they think they know and to have the opportunity to predict, guess, and make connections between pieces of information and to think about the consequences of nutritional choices.

This interactive allows the learner to engage with the interactive and try 'what if?' scenarios with their daily food intake. This ability to experiment with different food types and intakes allows the learner to trial different diets without adverse health effects, and also allows them to build a conceptual model in which to judge their food intake away from the learning object. Another innovative feature of this interactive is that all the information is readily available; therefore students do not need additional resources. What they do have to do is make sense of the information provided, and apply it in a realistic manner. This is a different use of the online learning context where children become used to searching for information. The task can stimulate them to think deeply, discuss, debate, consider, choose and then receive feedback on their tasks, and expand their knowledge of dietary needs, diseases and nutrition.

Objects in this family

Gobbliser

The Gobbliser interactive enables students to create a profile of a person of a particular age and then add food items into a mouth and view the recommended dietary intake for that age group. The student is encouraged to first view their own daily food intake and RDI, and then compare it to another age group's. They are then able to create other profiles and suggested daily food intakes of that profile. The food items are grouped into four main categories - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snacks. Each group is then further broken up into smaller groups such as Cereals, Bread, Cooked Breakfast, so as to allow for each food item to be represented by an illustration. Once the student has filled the mouth with the daily food items they are shown an animation of the mouth chomping the food (accompanied by audio) and are then presented with the RDI in a graph format. At this point the user is able to access information pertaining to the nutrient in the RDI chart.