Educating Kids on Nutrition – The Fun Way Through the Food Hunt Adventure Game

Good food habits should start while young.

A study by Peralta in 2016 showed that educating kids on good nutrition at an early age promotes healthy eating habits that will most likely be practiced for a lifetime.

Teaching nutrition at an early age through interactive games and activities is an effective way to help children learn about healthy eating while having fun at the same time. 

Due to the lingering pandemic, online games are “in” among young children, with strict parental supervision on screen time, and even among adults, 

Children are still not allowed to go out and are getting restless being confined in their homes for almost a year now. Thus, one activity to lessen boredom among children is playing online games. 

Taking advantage of this trend, the Department of Science and Technology’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute (DOST-FNRI) developed and launched on November 25, 2020 the “Food Hunt Adventure” mobile game that is integrated into the iFNRI, the Institute’s umbrella of online information and services. 

 

 The Food Hunt Adventure mobile game aims to increase awareness on healthy eating and Pinggang Pinoy among pre-school and school-aged children 6-9 years old. 

The mobile game has the following modules in the game menu:

The first module in the game menu is the Story Mode that shows the different stages of the game that include the Kitchen, Backyard, Grocery and Market. 

The second module is the Arcade Mode which include mini-games such as FoodDrop and SpellaFood.

For Food Drop, the point system indicates that for every successful catch of healthy food item, the player will gain one (1) point, while catching less healthy food items will reduce time by 20 seconds. 

For SpellaFood, the player guesses the name of the food item shown in the screen. There are Easy, Moderate and Hard levels in this game. Each level has a time limit of five (5) minutes. 

Learning nutrition is fun through the Food Hunt Adventure Game. Let us enjoy and learn through this innovative mobile game by DOST-FNRI!