Senior Design Projects
ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2020
Design and Gamification of a Knowledge Bowl to Develop Nutrition Knowledge and Skills of College Students
| ********** | |
| Name | Lisa Miller |
| Affiliation | Human Ecology |
Project's details
| Project title | Design and Gamification of a Knowledge Bowl to Develop Nutrition Knowledge and Skills of College Students |
| Background | Poor dietary habits are a major preventable cause of premature death and represent over 20% of total healthcare costs. Early adulthood is an important period in which to learn about nutrition and develop healthy food-choice skills that help to lay a foundation of health to last through the life course. Unfortunately. young adults in general. and low-income young adults in particular. are increasingly likely to eat prepared foods which are often less nutritious. |
| Description | Nutrition knowledge and food-choice skills play an important role in guiding healthy dietary choices. but young adults often lack these abilities because of time. interest. or effort. The goal of this proposal is to gamify a knowledge bowl designed to motivate and teach college students about nutrition and how to eat for maximum energy and minimum cost and time. Gamification of learning activities represents a powerful and innovative way to tackle the problem of poor dietary habits and represents a paradigm shift in competitive world of health apps. |
| Deliverable | The desired outcome is a prototype of a web-based Knowledge Bowl in which questions from 2 (or more) domains and from a low or high level of difficulty are randomly presented to two (or more) online teams. Individuals can form their own teams or join an existing team. The team that first answers a question (multiple choice. true/false) correctly gains points toward that round; incorrect answers deduct points. Questions are presented in rounds (of 5 questions). scores and times are tracked. accumulated wins. awards. badges are posted to leaderboards. Competition could occur live (be synchronous). which would necessitate a scheduling feature. or could be asynchronous. The website will also 1) provide a “test your knowledge” quiz to enable individuals to better understand their strengths and weaknesses (and maybe qualify for certain teams) and 2) offer links to learning materials (pamphlets. brief reports. videos. slides. etc. ) where individuals can boost their knowledge. Our plan is to use the prototype in a pilot study to examine the extent to which the activities increase nutrition knowledge and food choice skills. We also plan to pursue funding to build out the games for the mini-course. which will enable us to scale up the project for wider use and larger impact. |
| Skill set desirable | Content (i.e.. questions. options. and answers) will be provided but we are seeking creative. talented. and insightful students to design the bowl using gamification features (e.g.. points. tracking. awards. badges. leaderboards). |
| Phone number | ********** |
| Client time availability | 30-60 min weekly or more |
| IP requirement | Open source project |
| Attachment | Click here |
| Selected | No |
| Team members | N/A |
| TA | N/A |