Video game teaches kids about diet - then turns off Options

[Mole]

Video game teaches kids about diet - then turns off
By Lisa Baertlein
Tue Sep 25, 2:05 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - With child obesity rates rising, the U.S.'s biggest health maintenance organization on Tuesday launched an online video game to teach kids what to eat -- and then shut down after 20 minutes.

Kaiser Permanente said "The Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective" was designed to teach 9- and 10-year-olds about healthy eating and exercise.

But rather than keep children in front of the computer for hours, the title aims to get kids moving. It has a function that locks players out after 20 minutes -- and another that won't let them back in until for another 60 minutes.

"Kids in America spend too much time in front of the TV, and the messages they get there about eating, activity, and role models are all the wrong (ones)," said Ray Baxter, senior vice president for community benefit at Kaiser Permanente.

"Finger-wagging and telling kids to eat more green vegetables is not going to work. You've got to change the environment and change the message."

The game includes printable scavenger hunts that teach kids to make sense of food labels, experiments that show kids how to measure sugar in drinks, healthy recipes, muscle-building exercises and family activities to promote better eating.

The new game is part of Kaiser's campaign to combat childhood obesity, rates of which have tripled in the past 15 years.

Nearly 20 percent of children in the United States are now obese, fueling concerns about shorter life-expectancy and the soaring cost of caring for adults with diabetes and other obesity-related diseases.

The state of West Virginia, which has the worst childhood obesity problem in nation, helped pioneer the use of video games in the battle of the bulge when it made Konami Corp's "Dance Dance Revolution" dancing game part of the curriculum in public schools.

"Because obesity that begins in childhood is associated with more severe adult obesity, the effective prevention and treatment of childhood obesity is a critical strategy to control the rise in medical costs," said William Dietz, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert on obesity and nutrition.

Over the past six years, Kaiser has partnered with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in developing an anti-obesity strategy.

Kaiser's game is available free of charge in English and Spanish versions at www.kp.org/amazingfooddetective and through the CDC's site at www.cdc.gov.

Kaiser and publisher Scholastic Inc also will distribute the game, along with teacher lesson plans and parent guides, to more than 5,000 public schools nationwide.

[Pandra]

Errr.... that sounds like a bad idea. Not the teaching kids about diet, but the shutting down after 20 minutes and then locking itself for 60 minutes. Some kids are slow readers, from personal expereince my girls are not going to get through material in the same amount of time another child would. They'd have been better off to stage it in lessons. Allow the child to get through the lesson at their own pass, then shut down for an hour to give the kids time to go apply that lesson and come back for more.

[Jerky]

And the question still remains:
Where the hell are the parents of these kids who spend too much time in front of the TV/Computer/Video Games?

Hell, where were the parents of the Columbine kids for that matter? To me, it is absolutely not okay to blame media, etc. It falls on the shoulders of the parent's 100% of the time, no if's and's or but's about it.

[Pandra]

Very true, and as we see with the current trend in lax parenting it opens the door for businesses, schools and the government to step in and decide what is good for our kids. I've bitched to ya'll plently about the fights I've had with my kids school when I feel their over stepping bounds so I won't start again. But the reason this is happening is because these places feel they can because most parents simply aren't being parents.

Would I like more educational and fun games for my kids? Yah. Am I going to buy them a game that they can only play for 20 minutes an hour? No. 1) it offends me that someone else is trying impose their sense of appropriate time expenditure on my kids. 2) I know it's going to be frustrating to my girls if they're in the middle of something and finally "getting it" and have the stupid thing shut down on them for an hour. 3) This is exactly the kind of ill thought out plan that has me constantly grappling horns with the local school.

[Jerky]

Yeah, don't you just love capitalism. They (think they) see a need, then make a product to fill the void. Wonderful ain't it. The frightening thing is, people are going to buy it. I love this place.

[Minthos]

Wait wait wait.. let me get this straight - The game is about food.

Then it shuts down after 20 minutes, leaving the kids bored, and thinking about food. How exactly is that supposed to prevent obesity? Wouldn't that just make the kids eat more? I know I would.. Often what prevents me from eating is being too preoccupied with something to notice I'm getting hungry..

[RicoSuave]

lol, Minthos. You're awesome!

I think I agree with Pandra on this that the whole notion isn't a bad idea (for a parent to implement), but it is the implementation (by others) of that poorly-conceived idea that is the issue. I don't mean to get you started again on a sore topic, but that is one of the main reasons my wife and I are considering Home Schooling in a few years once our little poopers are old enough.

On a tangent to this topic, there is a text-based, web-based (very limited graphics, but fun) game out there called Kingdom of Loathing that grants the player 40 "adventures" a day. If you don't spend all of your adventures, they rollover to the next day... up to a total of 200 adventures stored up.

I know we had a thread about a little over a year ago regarding doing something to create a diminishing return upon Over-Playing. This is just one guy's take on the situation. It is a moral issue that we would be basically enforcing upon others as well. I guess the next question we have to ask ourselves is if we were discussing it to impose a unanomous ethic that people should, in fact, have lives; or if we were trying to semi-normalize gameplay giving the enthusiast with little time to play a 'fighting' chance... pardon the pun.

[Pandra]

If you have the ability and patients to home school I highly recommend it Rico. You'll save yourself alot of headaches and insure your children get an better education

[Mole]

Ok lots of responses to people in here.

Pandra:

I agree, some kids are very slow readers. Maybe there is an option in the game to set what the timeout and lockout periods are? If not, then there probably should be an option like that.

I think a better option here might be a game that involves the parents with the child’s learning activities and also includes exercise. Why not have a game where children are required to do some sort of physical activity (like 5 pushups or something) to get to the next level. The only way they can “level up” is to do the exercise and have the parents sign off on it in the same. It’s not the best solution, but it is something that takes into account different learning speeds of children.

I am not too keen on the whole home schooling thing though. While the public educational system has some problems, I still think that children have a better chance when placed and taught properly in a real educational system. Most parents do not do home schooling justice.

Jerky:
The parents of those kids who spend too much time in front of the computer are probably our kids! (At least for those of us who have kids.) Look at how much time we spend in front of the computer, whether it is for playing games, PW, work (as in our day-job), checking email, etc. Children learn behavioral patterns from watching those around them, especially their parents. If children see their parents in front of the computer all the time, then they are going to do the same thing.

Minthos:

That the game is about food struck me as funny too. If you talk to me about food for 20 minutes then walk away, I’m probably going to be hungry. Unlike most couch-potato children I am hyperactive (I run marathons), so I know how, when, and what to eat when I need to eat. Children aren’t like that. They need to be shown. Seems a bit counterproductive to me.

RicoSuave:

I have played KoL a lot. Even though the game only gives you 20 adventures a day, the premise of the game is different. The game is meant more as a farce and social commentary and not a teaching tool. Although I guess it does teach haiku!

-Mole

[Pandra]

I'm not an advocate of everyone homeschooling. I mean most parents lack of skill in that area is evendent in their kids, which is part of the reason school have gotten so bad. Kids bring what they learn (or don't learn) at home to school with them. However most schools in the US do not have a proper educational setting or system. They just bludgeon kids with information repeatedly until they can pass the required tests. Ask the child a month down the road and chances are good they won't have retained any of the information even if they scored well on the test.

However having read Rico's posts and having a feeling for his temperment and personallity I suspect he's a good candidate for being a home schooling parent. There are people who homeschool who shouldn't and there are draw backs to homeschooling just as there are for the public education system.

I stopped home schooling my kids because it was making them resentful of the public school. They still feel public school is wasting their time, and that's a hard one to argue with because it is. In a one on one session I can cover more material at my children's pace in a couple of hours, where the school takes 8 hours out of their day and they might cover half as much material but not get anything from it.

Some links, mainly on the big socializing myth.
http://www.rru.com/~meo/hs/faq.html#socialization
http://geocities.com/nelstomlinson/socialization.html
http://www.themorningstaracademy.org/artic...ation_myth.html

One of the weakest arguments I hear against home schooling is that kids don't "experience" life, or learn how to "deal with" people who may be jerks, bullies, or otherwise abusive to those around them. This is not experience kids should have. End. Parents go to jail for being abusive, so why is it ok for other kids to mistreat my kids? It's not. It is detrimental to children's development and to the educational process.

The other argument is that homeschooled kids are too sheltered. Again, wrong. Home schooling takes up less of a child's time so they have more time to experience real world environements, provided their parents give them those oppertunities. There are just as many sheltered kids in public school as in home school environments. I know first hand, my cousins were terribly sheltered, to the point it crippled them initially as adults. We all attended the same public school. That is the direct result of parental failure, not the system of education.

Schools are horrible right now. It's frustrating because it seems people are well aware of that, but the policy makers and goverment over seers don't seem at all interested in improving the school systems, instead they're acctually doing stuff to make them worse. While the majority of the population isn't capable of home schooling (hell alot of them shouldn't be allowed to produce offspring at all), those who are capable really owe it to themselves, their children and the country to home school because their kids are the ones who are going to have the best shot at getting ahead and getting things straightened out for future generations.