The Cutting Edge: COMPUTERS / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Kids May Not Change Their Diet, but They Will Learn About Nutrition
Getting kids to eat right is never an easy task. I’m not sure that a software program can possibly succeed where so many other efforts have failed, but a couple of new CD-ROMs make a noble effort. Frankly, I doubt whether either will in the end get kids to choose the right foods, but they do teach kids about nutrition, exercise and anatomy. Besides, my in-house advisers, Katherine, 10, and William, 8, tell me they’re fun to play.
With Dr. Health’nStein’s Body Fun (Mac and Windows, $49.95) from StarPress ((415) 274-8383), you start out by picking your gender and skin color, choosing between all the usual skin tones plus green and purple. The main part of the game takes place on a screen equivalent to a game board. Your character advances from the start to various places where it can eat or exercise.
Sites include a school cafeteria, a vending machine, a breakfast table and various restaurants. As you put foods on your plate, the program tallies up your total fat, calories and other nutrients. Choose wisely and you accumulate points, make poor choices and you loose a point or two.
Everyone starts off at age 10 and gets older as they complete each round until they reach 90. At the end of each round, you engage in an athletic competition (swimming the Nile, running a marathon or surfing in Hawaii) but whether you win or lose depends entirely on how many points you accumulated during the previous round.
The game is full of excellent nutritional advice and gives kids some good eating and exercise rules. It didn’t take my kids long to figure out which foods to eat and avoid and how long to exercise for the highest score. While both kids enjoyed the game and learned a few facts about food and nutrition, it didn’t do much for their habits. After playing it for several hours, we went out to dinner and Katherine ordered chocolate cake for dessert. “I guess I just lost two points,” she joked.
When you’re ready for a break from the competition, you can visit the “lab” where there are lots of activities. You can read from the book that covers basic body facts with chapters on food, exercise and major body organs. Nicely illustrated and reasonably complete, it’s far from babyish. The lab also has a series of videos on the dangers of fat and other bad stuff. William’s favorite activity, the “bag of guts,” requires you to move a bag full of body parts to their proper location on an outline of a body.
My favorite lab activity is the “body monitor.” Your character stands behind a scanner which analyzes your behavior so far in the game and projects your appearance and health at any age you enter. After losing a couple of rounds as a teen-ager, William set the scanner for age 90 and was transformed into an overweight senior citizen. A more true-to-life monitor might have shown a tombstone, but hey, this is a kids game aimed at children 7 through 14.
Another program with a similar theme is Body Park ($35) from Virtual Entertainment ((617) 449-7567). Aimed at younger kids, from about 6 to 10, the game takes place at an amusement park where you meet an inanimate body named “Harvey.” The body is really just an outline: Your job is to fill it with all the proper body parts to make it come alive.
Like Dr. Health’nStein’s, the educational object is to get kids to learn about nutrition, exercise and basic anatomy. Fitting with the younger target age, the activities are a bit more basic and there is less textual material. There’s an activity for each major part of the body. William’s favorite, the skeleton, is a jigsaw puzzle. You click on bone, a voice tells you its name and you drag it to the correct location on the body. It’s a great way to learn the differences between a fibula and a femur.
I liked the section on the mouth. To get through that activity, you have to brush, floss and use mouthwash until the gunk and plaque are gone. The American Dental Assn. couldn’t have made it any clearer. William rated the game as “pretty neat,” which is not his highest rating but a lot better than “ducky,” “boring” or “icy.’
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