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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Educational games; Nutrition--Study and teaching;

Abstract

The problem of the study was the lack of entertaining and effective ways to teach nutrition in the youth phase of the Expanded Nutrition Program in Black Hawk County, Iowa. The question of the study was can a game be developed which will teach the participants in the youth phase certain nutritional concepts and be appealing to the youth. The author developed a game for the population in the study which was effective in teaching certain cognitive information about nutrition and appeared to be appealing to them. The development of the game included three main steps--review of commercial games, designing a game, evaluating the game. The designing of the game involved playing it with people and revising it. The objective of the game is for players to learn the names of the twelve key nutrients--riboflavin, niacin, thiamin, iron, calcium, water, protein, carbohydrate, fat, Vitamins A, C and D--their functions in the body, and in what foods they are found. The game is a board game at which two to four players of the ages ten on up can play. The board consists of three concentric circles divided into eighty-four sections with four "alleyways" equidistant apart. Thirty-six of the sections indicate a need for one of the twelve nutrients, such as "Need Vitamin A." On four of the squares are the words "Any Food Free." Six of the sections indicate that the player who lands on them is to lose 50 cents for cookies, popcorn, potato chips, gum, candy or cookies. The four outer sections along the alleyways are marked, "Start." Players move plastic tokens around the board according to the number of moves indicated by a throw of dice. The object is to land on a nutrient square on the board. This gives the player the chance to buy a food card from the grocery store with his three dollar fund of play money. Hopefully, the food card will have listed on the back the nutrient on which he landed. If the food does contain the nutrient, the player gets a chance to earn an extra play quarter by selecting the correct function of that nutrient in the body. If he buys a food that does not contain the correct nutrient, he forfeits the money he paid for the food and he forfeits the food card. The food cards are used to cover the nutrient squares on the nutritious person card each player has. The first player to cover all twelve squares is the winner of the game. The method of evaluation included a one-group pre-test posttest of the game's cognitive effectiveness. A related t test of the pre-test and post-test revealed a significant difference at the .05 level with a score of 4.615. The evaluation also included a rating scale of the appeal of the game administered after the game was played. The average score on the rating scale was 4.4. The scale went from one to five with five being the indication of the greatest appeal.

Year of Submission

1972

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Home Economics

First Advisor

Marilyn Story

Second Advisor

Dorlan D. Mork

Third Advisor

Billie L. Sands

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

1972

Object Description

1 PDF file (89 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Included in

Nutrition Commons

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