My final project used enticing and vibrant color as a means to start chipping away at our country's childhood obesity epidemic. My goal was to create a visually stimulating toy/play experience that would allow children to "accidentally" learn some things about nutrition while they competed agains their own past scores or their friends.
The toy/game consists of a shallow box that contains a number of game pieces, each of which has a vibrant photo of a healthy food on it, and a point value on the back that would ultimately be derived from a thorough analysis of their nutritional value. (In later iterations I would also introduce a small number of unhealthy foods with negative point values.) The objective is to assemble the meal that they think will get the highest point value! (There is even a dry erase scoreboard included on the lid to keep score.) There are six different "compartments" or "slots" for the pieces to go in, sized so that the child has to include on item from each food group in their final meal, and a collection of extra pieces in a hidden compartment under the main board.
My hope is that with repeated playing of this type of game, children would become familiar with healthy foods and be more likely to eat or request them in real life. When you spend so much time looking at beautiful photography of saturated vitamin-rich foods, for many people frieds foods would start to look less and less appetizing—and while I realize this is less likely to happen with kids, I believe that there is something to be said for our instinctual attraction to brightly colored (read: nutritionally valuable) fruits and vegetables that was developed over thousands of years. Marketing is certainly a tough beast to go up against, but this type of activity could only help, not hurt, the situation.
In addition, the game would work in some ways like a game of Memory, where the child would start to remember the point values associated with each type of food, which would hopefully stay with them later in life. Giving kids a sense of what food is good or bad for them at a young age in a positive way could be highly valuable by allowing them to wield some knowledge on nutrition without burdening them with worries about calories and fat—burdening children with the concept of "dieting" at a young age can be dangerous for some, potentially leading to the beginnings of bad lifelong relationships with food.
Images of the final/current prototype can be viewed below:
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