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Domain name: funmobile.com
Registrant Contact:
Funmobile
Christian Yau ()
Fax:
29/F, One Kowloon
1 Wang Yuen Street
Kowloon Bay, KOWLOON HK
HK
Administrative Contact:
Funmobile
Christian Yau (
)
+852.37609393
Fax:
29/F, One Kowloon
1 Wang Yuen Street
Kowloon Bay, KOWLOON HK
HK
Technical Contact:
Funmobile
Christian Yau ()
+852.37609393
Fax:
29/F, One Kowloon
1 Wang Yuen Street
Kowloon Bay, KOWLOON HK
HK
Status: Locked
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dns2.funmobile.com
Creation date: 20 Nov 2000 13:50:39
Expiration date: 20 Nov 2012 13:50:00
Registrant Contact:
Funmobile
Christian Yau ()
Fax:
29/F, One Kowloon
1 Wang Yuen Street
Kowloon Bay, KOWLOON HK
HK
Administrative Contact:
Funmobile
Christian Yau (
+852.37609393
Fax:
29/F, One Kowloon
1 Wang Yuen Street
Kowloon Bay, KOWLOON HK
HK
Technical Contact:
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What is the most fun/hard/easy mobile platform to develop for today?
I had a SonyEricsson P800 running Symbian OS a long time ago and did some Java applications on it. I felt that JavaME was so limited at that time, but it was maybe 5 years ago. Please, share your experiences; I need an update. | |||||
feedback
|
I think iPhone's is, by far, the most fun
and exciting platform to develop for. Even though I am not a huge fan of
Obj-C, its API is full featured and quite easy to use. Apple's AppStore
behind makes it the most compelling platform to work for. Despite all
the bad rep Apple has for its unclear approvement process. Documentation
is very good.
PalmOS? Too old and almost unsupported by now. Complete lack of good development tools. Documentation is very bad. Windows Mobile? I like Windows Mobile. In my opinion, Visual Studio is the best IDE you can use to code, and that's what you use when you develop for Windows Mobile. Having said that, Windows Mobile really rocks for FormBased applications, but for general purpose ones, is still behind iPhone's. Documentation is very good. Android? I like it. It's very good. But even though I like Eclipse for Java editing, it's not that great for mobile development. Its simulator is too slow. I haven't used it that much though. Documentation is quite alright. Symbian? Having C/C++ behind is the most difficult one. But it has the biggest installed base so it can't be ignored by any mean. Tools aren't that great and neither is documentation. Blackberry? Java based. Easy to use as long as you don't mess with protected API (your app will need special approvement from RIM to use it). If you take into consideration Java based API's, I like Android better. But RIM's installed based makes it difficult to ignore this platform. JavaME? Only for low end phones. | ||||
feedback
|
My next phone (in the next few weeks) will
be an Android-based G1. Not so keen on the Java-based development, but
I can understand why they did that.
I am more of a server-side kinda guy (big websites and scaling in PHP), but I am thinking of playing around with that though. | ||||
feedback
|
I have only tried iPhone and Android, but
between the two, I think Android is the most "fun." Mainly because I
don't really like ObjC much, and I have had a lot of experience with
Java. It does annoy me that you can't use the normal JDK, but it's not
that big of a problem.
Also, when developing for the iPhone, you have this constant fear that they will reject your app. Many great ideas would never be allowed into the App Store, so people resort to the usual shovelware. | ||||
feedback
|
Well, fun and easy would presumably go together.
By reputation, Symbian OS C++ is the hardest platform to develop for but most people who spread this are not up to date on the latest initiatives to fix the issue. It will probably still be true for a little while. I would say Android has a huge advantage over iPhone in terms of fun, at the very least because of openness and linux core. J2ME and blackberry are not supported well enough and too fragmented to be either fun or easy. PalmOs is dead and WebOS is not there just yet. I would still suggest using a very recent Symbian phone mostly because of the sheer diversity of development runtimes available : nsbasic, .net, ruby, python, j2me, c++, c, webkit, opera widgets... It will be even better soon when the whole platform is open sourced. | |||||
feedback
|
I believe iPhone would be the most fun one.
| |||||||
feedback
|
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged mobile mobile-phones or ask your own question.
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Grocery Hunter: A Fun Mobile Game for Children to Combat Obesity
Hyungsin Kim 1,2, Anya Kogan4, Chandan Dasgupta5, Michael Misha Novitzky2,
and Ellen Yi-Luen Do1,2,3
GVU Center1
College of Computing2 & College of Architecture3 Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, USA
HUGE4
New York, USA
Learning Sciences Research Institute5 University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
{hyungsin, misha}@gatech.edu, akogan@hugeinc.com, cdasgu2@uic.edu, ellendo@gatech.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a handheld mobile game, Grocery Hunter that encourages children to take on healthy eating habits. Children can use a pocket PC to play the Grocery Hunter game to learn about food nutrition and healthy food choices. Childhood obesity in the United States has already reached epidemic proportions. The best way to help children attain and maintain healthy weight is through physical activity and nutritious eating. Our design addresses nutrition directly by teaching children healthy eating habits using an interactive game in the grocery store.
Author Keywords
Interactive design, mobile devices for children, health communications, just-in-time learning
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
General Terms
Human Factors, Experimentation, Design.
INTRODUCTION
The Grocery Hunter is a mobile system which teaches children to make smart choices at the grocery store while they are shopping with their parents. The prevalence of obesity in the United States has skyrocketed in the last 30 years [5]. In particular, childhood obesity in the United States has already reached epidemic proportions with 17% of children being classified as overweight [6]. Robinson and Killen [7] describe the major reasons for the increase in childhood obesity are the lack of exercise, consumption of poorer-quality food, excess television watching, and cultural values. Obese children are less likely to exercise and are more likely to have high blood pressures which in adulthood have shown to correlate with heart disease, stroke, and diabetes in middle adulthood [4]. Not only are the children who are overweight or obese affected but society is financially impacted with the health costs associated with the complications of these medical conditions. It is crucial to work on both prevention and treatment of child obesity. Thus, our design focuses on encouraging healthy eating habits in school age children.
The target users for the system are children ages from 7 to 11. This period in child development is called middle childhood because it occurs in between early childhood and adolescence. It is also referred to as the school years because it is at this point in their development when they are attending elementary school. In general, children of this age group are capable of self-care such as dressing themselves, brushing their teeth, and washing themselves. This age group can entertain themselves. Their reading levels vary greatly from barely being able to read and write simple sentences to being able to read small novels. The children in this age range physically grow at a steady rate. A typical 10 year old will weigh 70 pounds and be 4 ½ feet tall. In general, a child will gain 5 to 7 pounds while increasing in height by 2 inches a year [2]. A child is considered overweight if they are up to twenty percent above what the ideal weight is for their age and height and are considered obese if they pass the twenty percent threshold. More specifically, a ten-year old child is more at risk for becoming an overweight adult if they are already obese than whether or not their parents were obese. This suggests that intervention in this age group will have everlasting effects.
DESIGN
The Grocery Hunter is a mobile gaming system which teaches children to make smart nutritional choices. There are several studies about using games to teach children how to eat the right food [1, 3]. The Grocery Hunter is used by kids when accompanying their parents on shopping trips. The system provides the child with a clue about a healthy grocery store item located in the vicinity of the unit, thus keeping the child near their parents and not interfering with the parents’ shopping tasks. Once the child has found what they think is the appropriate item, they simply scan the item with the Grocery Hunter. If their choice was correct, the system confirms and provides nutritional information for that item. Otherwise, it indicates that the response was incorrect and provides them with an additional clue.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
TEI’11, January 22–26, 2011, Funchal, Portugal.
Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0478-8/11/01...$10.00.
317
Advantages of the system design as well as the game flow diagram are described below.
Directly addresses obesity: The Grocery Hunter directly addresses the objective of battling childhood obesity by encouraging healthy eating habits. While the children are searching for healthy items in the grocery store, they are either learning new information about healthy foods or are reinforcing prior knowledge. By encouraging children in this manner, they may increase the amount of nutritious food purchased and therefore consumed.
Grow to be health conscious adults: Nutritionally educated children will grow into nutritionally conscious adults. In turn, they will be more likely to purchase and eat more nutritious food.
Education through a game: The system educates the children about nutritious foods and their benefits by using gaming technology with which they become actively engaged. This type of system is a natural extension of a child’s inclination for play.
Only focus on healthy food: This system does not harp on the negative 'junk' food. Instead, it includes solely nutritious foods. This may help shift children’s attention away from junk food and towards healthy food in a nonabrasive fashion.
USER SCENARIO
The following narrative describes a Grocery Hunter usage scenario in a grocery store.
Mrs. Marcy Gray has just picked up her daughter, Jane, from after-school care. She knows that her refrigerator is near empty at home and needs to stop by the grocery store before driving home. She usually tries to leave Jane with a babysitter during these trips, but could not do so today. She begrudgingly stops by the grocery store with Jane. Jane is already beginning to whine, as she hates sitting still in the cart while her mom looks through the aisles for Jane seems like an eternity. However, today is different. As Mrs. Gray enters the store, a grocery clerk politely offers a digital toy, called Grocery Hunter, for her daughter. Mrs. Gray accepts. She looks briefly at it, and then hands it to her daughter to figure out how it works. Accustomed to mobile toys, her daughter quickly takes the device and enters her age to begin. As Mrs. Gray is wheeling the cart through the vegetable aisle the device prompts Jane to look for an orange vegetable that is good for her eyes. Jane sees an apple and points the Grocery Hunter at it. The device responds, “Nice try, but this is an apple. It is great for your teeth. Would you like another hint about the orange vegetable?” Jane rejects the help and continues to point at other foods until she finally locates the carrots. The avatar congratulates her on the find and asks if she would like to play again. Jane agrees. As she plays round after round of this digital scavenger hunt, she barely notices the time pass. Soon, her mom is checking out and they are ready to go home. Mrs. Gray drops off the device at the checkout making a note to herself to be sure to use the device again next time.
PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTATION
For prototyping purposes, a Pocket PC was used running an interactive program developed with Adobe Flash. The user interacts with the program through the touch screen. The system is geared towards children between 7 and 11 years old. Figure 1 left shows the startup screen of the Grocery Hunter game displayed in a handheld mobile device, and Figure 1 right shows one example quest that ask the children to “Go and find the orange vegetable that is good for your eyes” in the Grocery Hunter game.
Figure 1. Grocery Hunter Screenshot
SPECIFIC JUSTIFICATION FOR PROTOTYPING
There are several aspects of the prototype implementation that were chosen in order to appeal to the target audience (7-11 years of age) more effectively.
Cartoon-like look and feel: The cartoons used in the design were meant to appeal to children within the target age range.
Identifiable avatar: During consultation with members of the Cartoon Network, it was suggested that the main avatar in the Grocery Hunter be a popular cartoon character Bloo from their show 'Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.' It was believed that this would allow children to quickly identify and thus enjoy using the Grocery Hunter.
Adobe Flash: Adobe Flash was chosen for the development of the Grocery Hunter prototype for several reasons. Aesthetically, it was able to support the cartoon look and feel. Functionally, it supported the desired touch screen. Finally, the team members had previous experience using Flash, thus reducing overall implementation time.
Pocket PC: The Pocket PC was the best touch screen hardware available for implementing our prototype at the time. The Pocket PC allows for a responsive system that is predictable given its onscreen mapping of buttons with overlapping text. Additionally, the Pocket PC has multiple methods of communication with other hardware devices such as USB, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi which makes it ideal if a situation requires communication with a server unit. 318
USABILITY TESTING METHODS
Usability testing consisted of observation of the system usage as well as pre- and post- opinion surveys from both children and parents. Here, we describe our participants, environment, and procedure. For our preliminary user study, we recruited 6 children and their respective 6 parents for a total of 12 participants. All participation was voluntary. All child participants were between 7 and 11-years-old. Parents also participated by watching their children play, listening to our explanation of the final prototype, and then completing a questionnaire.
Grocery Hunter is designed for use in a real grocery store which has plenty of items children want to eat. However, usability testing in real grocery stores was impractical within the context of this project and at this preliminary stage. Thus, we created an artificial store outside of a local Jujutsu studio where kids took classes. We placed a set of groceries on a table. They included items for which the children had to search in the game, as well as other foods including healthy and non-healthy options to act as a distraction. The extra amount of food added realistic complexity to a task that was outside of its intended environment (grocery store). Having put the table outside in a public place, we also simulated the distractions that are found in an authentic grocery store. While running the test, one experimenter walked with the child, while another videotaped the screens and the third stayed with the parents. Figure 2 shows how a child used the game during the study.
PROCEDURE
The children received instructions from an experimenter on how to play with the Grocery Hunter. Parents were encouraged to observe their child, but were encouraged to abstain from aiding them. They were told that the intention was to study the child’s individual interaction with the system. In a real scenario, some parents would help the child with the game, while others would not. Since we were testing only a small number of participants, we needed to minimize the number of independent variables in our system in order to obtain meaningful results. Therefore, we chose to control for parent intervention. We set up a video-recording of the experiment in order to capture each child’s finger movements on the game screen as well as their overall body movement as they searched for the proper foods on the table.
Recording this behavior allowed us further analysis after the experiment itself, avoiding sole reliance on the behaviors that we were able to capture in our notes while on-site. Finger movements can be a good indicator of participant’s mental perception of the system. For instance, if we saw them wavering between two buttons on the screen, we could hypothesize that the functionality of the two buttons was difficult to understand and predict. The body movements could also be an indicator of the difficulty of the clues.
Figure 2. Child using the game during study
If the child walked back and forth along the table several times, it is likely that they did not know which food to choose. During the active portion of this experiment, we were observing, taking notes, and videotaping the participants at the same time. We did not have the child think aloud, as that may have been confusing for them due to their young age and lack of experience with such protocol. However, detailed observations were noted during each task. Children were encouraged to complete the tasks on their own without asking anyone for help. If questions arose, we encouraged them to think through the solution for themselves and we only intervened when absolutely necessary. Once intervention had begun, we gave them minimal hints to the solution to avoid giving out answers until no other alternative was possible. In a real scenario, the designers would not be present to explain their products to users. Therefore, we wanted to see how the child would use the device without us, so as to have the most generalizable test results possible. After each child completed the five clues available, they were given a verbal questionnaire by the same experimenter who followed them around the table. This way, the child was already comfortable with that person and more likely to be complete in their responses. They were given the questions verbally because children were assumed to be unfamiliar with questionnaires and could not be relied upon to answer fully and accurately on their own. By asking the questions aloud, the experimenter could judge the child’s comprehension of the topic and elaborate if needed. While the children verbally answered their questions, their parents were given a written questionnaire. In the case of an adult, a written questionnaire was advisable so that the participants were more inclined to be honest when not being directly observed by an experimenter. The entire experiment, including the questionnaires, took each participant 30 minutes.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A specific goal for the Grocery Hunter was to teach children healthier eating habits. The game was intended to be used in the context of a relevant task (i.e. shopping in a
319
grocery store) so that it could be more engaging and meaningful for the children. Had the same information about nutrient content in various food items been given to the children while they were at home, it would not have been as relevant. Hence the key element here is the presence of an educational tool within a relevant environmental context. What this means is that the Grocery Hunter draws its power from its portable design and contextual implementation. All the children who used the Grocery Hunter prototype conveyed to us that they enjoyed using it and thought that it would benefit them by helping them make informed decisions while they were shopping with their parents. That the children enjoyed interacting with the Grocery Hunter is further strengthened by the fact that all the children indicated that they would like to play with it again. This enthusiasm also bears testimony to this design’s ability to hold the user’s attention. Even the adults who accompanied the children thought that the Grocery Hunter would help them while they were shopping. This kind of help actually happens at two levels – engagement and epistemology. At the level of engagement, the children are busy interacting with the Grocery Hunter and this alleviates the parents’ concern of having to “run after” their kids. The game has been designed in such a way that the clues being given are both interesting and informative to the right extent. “Informative to the right extent” means that the correct information is presented in a succinct manner that does not overwhelm or bore the user. The effectiveness of the design is enhanced by the just-in-time manner in which the information is presented. The second level, epistemology, is perhaps more important. Our game teaches the user to “think healthy”. As long as the user is inside the store, the game encourages them to think about food items around them from a nutritional perspective instead of the purely flavor-focused perspective. Inherently, we are all impulsive buyers and our decisions on what to buy are influenced a lot by the look-and-feel of the item. If something looks good and appealing, we are inclined to buy it. With kids, especially, various kinds of chocolates, candies, and chips are the hottest to-buy items. The game helps under such circumstances by keeping the user focused on the nutritional perspective of all the items in the store. Association of items with their nutritional advantages and disadvantages tends to carry over to situations outside the grocery store as well. Because of the level and duration of engagement with the game inside the store, the items become more closely associated with their nutritional characteristics. Thus, a carrot becomes more likely to evoke the thought of something orange and good for eyes. We feel that this sort of association will bear a strong influence on the kind of food choices the person makes as they grow up.
CONCLUSION
We learned about the many health hazards of obesity and that the best time to challenge this epidemic is in its infancy, specifically in children between seven and eleven-years-old. Fitness and nutrition are the two key solutions to obesity. Having developed several innovative ideas that focused on either fitness or nutrition, we finally chose a concept that tackled nutrition explicitly. Our solution, the Grocery Hunter, teaches children to make smart eating choices, while growing them into smart adult shoppers and easing the lives of their parents during a shopping trip. The Grocery Hunter exemplifies one of many potential new and interesting ways of placing nutritional facts in front of our users during key decision times. Since some children found the questions presented too hard, while others found them too easy, we think that creating an adaptive system would broaden the appeal of the game. We believe that once these and other findings are addressed, the Grocery Hunter has high market potential and would be capable of positively impacting the fight against childhood obesity. In future studies, we plan to develop more game modules that harness the knowledge of additional nutrition specialists. We also intend to explore the relationship between eating behavior changes and game play.
REFERENCES
1. Aoki, N., Ohta, S., Masuda, H., et al. Edutainment Tools for Initial Education of Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus: Initial Diabetes Education with Fun. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 107(Pt 2), IOS Press (2004), 855-859.
2. Berger, K. S. The Developing Person through Childhood and Adolescence. Worth Publishers, 2003.
3. Engvall, J. and McCarthy, A.M. Innovative approaches for teaching children with chronic conditions. Journal of Pediatric Health Care, 10, 5 (1996), 239-242.
4. Freedman, D., Dietz, W., Srinivasan, S. and Berenson, F. The Relation of Overweight to Cardiovascular Risk Factors Among Children and Adolescents: The Bogalusa Heart Study. Pediatrics, 103, 6 (1999), 1175-1182.
5. How to avoid portion size pitfalls to help manage your weight, May 2007. http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/portion_size.html
6. Huang, T.T. and Horlick M.N. Trends in Childhood Obesity Research: A Brief Analysis of NIH Supported Efforts. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 35, 1 (2007), 148-153.
7. Robinson, T. and Killen, J. Obesity Prevention for Children and Adolescents. In Body Image, Eating Disorders, and Obesity in Youth, United Book Press (2001), 261-292. 320
Hyungsin Kim 1,2, Anya Kogan4, Chandan Dasgupta5, Michael Misha Novitzky2,
and Ellen Yi-Luen Do1,2,3
GVU Center1
College of Computing2 & College of Architecture3 Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, USA
HUGE4
New York, USA
Learning Sciences Research Institute5 University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
{hyungsin, misha}@gatech.edu, akogan@hugeinc.com, cdasgu2@uic.edu, ellendo@gatech.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a handheld mobile game, Grocery Hunter that encourages children to take on healthy eating habits. Children can use a pocket PC to play the Grocery Hunter game to learn about food nutrition and healthy food choices. Childhood obesity in the United States has already reached epidemic proportions. The best way to help children attain and maintain healthy weight is through physical activity and nutritious eating. Our design addresses nutrition directly by teaching children healthy eating habits using an interactive game in the grocery store.
Author Keywords
Interactive design, mobile devices for children, health communications, just-in-time learning
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
General Terms
Human Factors, Experimentation, Design.
INTRODUCTION
The Grocery Hunter is a mobile system which teaches children to make smart choices at the grocery store while they are shopping with their parents. The prevalence of obesity in the United States has skyrocketed in the last 30 years [5]. In particular, childhood obesity in the United States has already reached epidemic proportions with 17% of children being classified as overweight [6]. Robinson and Killen [7] describe the major reasons for the increase in childhood obesity are the lack of exercise, consumption of poorer-quality food, excess television watching, and cultural values. Obese children are less likely to exercise and are more likely to have high blood pressures which in adulthood have shown to correlate with heart disease, stroke, and diabetes in middle adulthood [4]. Not only are the children who are overweight or obese affected but society is financially impacted with the health costs associated with the complications of these medical conditions. It is crucial to work on both prevention and treatment of child obesity. Thus, our design focuses on encouraging healthy eating habits in school age children.
The target users for the system are children ages from 7 to 11. This period in child development is called middle childhood because it occurs in between early childhood and adolescence. It is also referred to as the school years because it is at this point in their development when they are attending elementary school. In general, children of this age group are capable of self-care such as dressing themselves, brushing their teeth, and washing themselves. This age group can entertain themselves. Their reading levels vary greatly from barely being able to read and write simple sentences to being able to read small novels. The children in this age range physically grow at a steady rate. A typical 10 year old will weigh 70 pounds and be 4 ½ feet tall. In general, a child will gain 5 to 7 pounds while increasing in height by 2 inches a year [2]. A child is considered overweight if they are up to twenty percent above what the ideal weight is for their age and height and are considered obese if they pass the twenty percent threshold. More specifically, a ten-year old child is more at risk for becoming an overweight adult if they are already obese than whether or not their parents were obese. This suggests that intervention in this age group will have everlasting effects.
DESIGN
The Grocery Hunter is a mobile gaming system which teaches children to make smart nutritional choices. There are several studies about using games to teach children how to eat the right food [1, 3]. The Grocery Hunter is used by kids when accompanying their parents on shopping trips. The system provides the child with a clue about a healthy grocery store item located in the vicinity of the unit, thus keeping the child near their parents and not interfering with the parents’ shopping tasks. Once the child has found what they think is the appropriate item, they simply scan the item with the Grocery Hunter. If their choice was correct, the system confirms and provides nutritional information for that item. Otherwise, it indicates that the response was incorrect and provides them with an additional clue.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
TEI’11, January 22–26, 2011, Funchal, Portugal.
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317
Advantages of the system design as well as the game flow diagram are described below.
Directly addresses obesity: The Grocery Hunter directly addresses the objective of battling childhood obesity by encouraging healthy eating habits. While the children are searching for healthy items in the grocery store, they are either learning new information about healthy foods or are reinforcing prior knowledge. By encouraging children in this manner, they may increase the amount of nutritious food purchased and therefore consumed.
Grow to be health conscious adults: Nutritionally educated children will grow into nutritionally conscious adults. In turn, they will be more likely to purchase and eat more nutritious food.
Education through a game: The system educates the children about nutritious foods and their benefits by using gaming technology with which they become actively engaged. This type of system is a natural extension of a child’s inclination for play.
Only focus on healthy food: This system does not harp on the negative 'junk' food. Instead, it includes solely nutritious foods. This may help shift children’s attention away from junk food and towards healthy food in a nonabrasive fashion.
USER SCENARIO
The following narrative describes a Grocery Hunter usage scenario in a grocery store.
Mrs. Marcy Gray has just picked up her daughter, Jane, from after-school care. She knows that her refrigerator is near empty at home and needs to stop by the grocery store before driving home. She usually tries to leave Jane with a babysitter during these trips, but could not do so today. She begrudgingly stops by the grocery store with Jane. Jane is already beginning to whine, as she hates sitting still in the cart while her mom looks through the aisles for Jane seems like an eternity. However, today is different. As Mrs. Gray enters the store, a grocery clerk politely offers a digital toy, called Grocery Hunter, for her daughter. Mrs. Gray accepts. She looks briefly at it, and then hands it to her daughter to figure out how it works. Accustomed to mobile toys, her daughter quickly takes the device and enters her age to begin. As Mrs. Gray is wheeling the cart through the vegetable aisle the device prompts Jane to look for an orange vegetable that is good for her eyes. Jane sees an apple and points the Grocery Hunter at it. The device responds, “Nice try, but this is an apple. It is great for your teeth. Would you like another hint about the orange vegetable?” Jane rejects the help and continues to point at other foods until she finally locates the carrots. The avatar congratulates her on the find and asks if she would like to play again. Jane agrees. As she plays round after round of this digital scavenger hunt, she barely notices the time pass. Soon, her mom is checking out and they are ready to go home. Mrs. Gray drops off the device at the checkout making a note to herself to be sure to use the device again next time.
PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTATION
For prototyping purposes, a Pocket PC was used running an interactive program developed with Adobe Flash. The user interacts with the program through the touch screen. The system is geared towards children between 7 and 11 years old. Figure 1 left shows the startup screen of the Grocery Hunter game displayed in a handheld mobile device, and Figure 1 right shows one example quest that ask the children to “Go and find the orange vegetable that is good for your eyes” in the Grocery Hunter game.
Figure 1. Grocery Hunter Screenshot
SPECIFIC JUSTIFICATION FOR PROTOTYPING
There are several aspects of the prototype implementation that were chosen in order to appeal to the target audience (7-11 years of age) more effectively.
Cartoon-like look and feel: The cartoons used in the design were meant to appeal to children within the target age range.
Identifiable avatar: During consultation with members of the Cartoon Network, it was suggested that the main avatar in the Grocery Hunter be a popular cartoon character Bloo from their show 'Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.' It was believed that this would allow children to quickly identify and thus enjoy using the Grocery Hunter.
Adobe Flash: Adobe Flash was chosen for the development of the Grocery Hunter prototype for several reasons. Aesthetically, it was able to support the cartoon look and feel. Functionally, it supported the desired touch screen. Finally, the team members had previous experience using Flash, thus reducing overall implementation time.
Pocket PC: The Pocket PC was the best touch screen hardware available for implementing our prototype at the time. The Pocket PC allows for a responsive system that is predictable given its onscreen mapping of buttons with overlapping text. Additionally, the Pocket PC has multiple methods of communication with other hardware devices such as USB, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi which makes it ideal if a situation requires communication with a server unit. 318
USABILITY TESTING METHODS
Usability testing consisted of observation of the system usage as well as pre- and post- opinion surveys from both children and parents. Here, we describe our participants, environment, and procedure. For our preliminary user study, we recruited 6 children and their respective 6 parents for a total of 12 participants. All participation was voluntary. All child participants were between 7 and 11-years-old. Parents also participated by watching their children play, listening to our explanation of the final prototype, and then completing a questionnaire.
Grocery Hunter is designed for use in a real grocery store which has plenty of items children want to eat. However, usability testing in real grocery stores was impractical within the context of this project and at this preliminary stage. Thus, we created an artificial store outside of a local Jujutsu studio where kids took classes. We placed a set of groceries on a table. They included items for which the children had to search in the game, as well as other foods including healthy and non-healthy options to act as a distraction. The extra amount of food added realistic complexity to a task that was outside of its intended environment (grocery store). Having put the table outside in a public place, we also simulated the distractions that are found in an authentic grocery store. While running the test, one experimenter walked with the child, while another videotaped the screens and the third stayed with the parents. Figure 2 shows how a child used the game during the study.
PROCEDURE
The children received instructions from an experimenter on how to play with the Grocery Hunter. Parents were encouraged to observe their child, but were encouraged to abstain from aiding them. They were told that the intention was to study the child’s individual interaction with the system. In a real scenario, some parents would help the child with the game, while others would not. Since we were testing only a small number of participants, we needed to minimize the number of independent variables in our system in order to obtain meaningful results. Therefore, we chose to control for parent intervention. We set up a video-recording of the experiment in order to capture each child’s finger movements on the game screen as well as their overall body movement as they searched for the proper foods on the table.
Recording this behavior allowed us further analysis after the experiment itself, avoiding sole reliance on the behaviors that we were able to capture in our notes while on-site. Finger movements can be a good indicator of participant’s mental perception of the system. For instance, if we saw them wavering between two buttons on the screen, we could hypothesize that the functionality of the two buttons was difficult to understand and predict. The body movements could also be an indicator of the difficulty of the clues.
Figure 2. Child using the game during study
If the child walked back and forth along the table several times, it is likely that they did not know which food to choose. During the active portion of this experiment, we were observing, taking notes, and videotaping the participants at the same time. We did not have the child think aloud, as that may have been confusing for them due to their young age and lack of experience with such protocol. However, detailed observations were noted during each task. Children were encouraged to complete the tasks on their own without asking anyone for help. If questions arose, we encouraged them to think through the solution for themselves and we only intervened when absolutely necessary. Once intervention had begun, we gave them minimal hints to the solution to avoid giving out answers until no other alternative was possible. In a real scenario, the designers would not be present to explain their products to users. Therefore, we wanted to see how the child would use the device without us, so as to have the most generalizable test results possible. After each child completed the five clues available, they were given a verbal questionnaire by the same experimenter who followed them around the table. This way, the child was already comfortable with that person and more likely to be complete in their responses. They were given the questions verbally because children were assumed to be unfamiliar with questionnaires and could not be relied upon to answer fully and accurately on their own. By asking the questions aloud, the experimenter could judge the child’s comprehension of the topic and elaborate if needed. While the children verbally answered their questions, their parents were given a written questionnaire. In the case of an adult, a written questionnaire was advisable so that the participants were more inclined to be honest when not being directly observed by an experimenter. The entire experiment, including the questionnaires, took each participant 30 minutes.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A specific goal for the Grocery Hunter was to teach children healthier eating habits. The game was intended to be used in the context of a relevant task (i.e. shopping in a
319
grocery store) so that it could be more engaging and meaningful for the children. Had the same information about nutrient content in various food items been given to the children while they were at home, it would not have been as relevant. Hence the key element here is the presence of an educational tool within a relevant environmental context. What this means is that the Grocery Hunter draws its power from its portable design and contextual implementation. All the children who used the Grocery Hunter prototype conveyed to us that they enjoyed using it and thought that it would benefit them by helping them make informed decisions while they were shopping with their parents. That the children enjoyed interacting with the Grocery Hunter is further strengthened by the fact that all the children indicated that they would like to play with it again. This enthusiasm also bears testimony to this design’s ability to hold the user’s attention. Even the adults who accompanied the children thought that the Grocery Hunter would help them while they were shopping. This kind of help actually happens at two levels – engagement and epistemology. At the level of engagement, the children are busy interacting with the Grocery Hunter and this alleviates the parents’ concern of having to “run after” their kids. The game has been designed in such a way that the clues being given are both interesting and informative to the right extent. “Informative to the right extent” means that the correct information is presented in a succinct manner that does not overwhelm or bore the user. The effectiveness of the design is enhanced by the just-in-time manner in which the information is presented. The second level, epistemology, is perhaps more important. Our game teaches the user to “think healthy”. As long as the user is inside the store, the game encourages them to think about food items around them from a nutritional perspective instead of the purely flavor-focused perspective. Inherently, we are all impulsive buyers and our decisions on what to buy are influenced a lot by the look-and-feel of the item. If something looks good and appealing, we are inclined to buy it. With kids, especially, various kinds of chocolates, candies, and chips are the hottest to-buy items. The game helps under such circumstances by keeping the user focused on the nutritional perspective of all the items in the store. Association of items with their nutritional advantages and disadvantages tends to carry over to situations outside the grocery store as well. Because of the level and duration of engagement with the game inside the store, the items become more closely associated with their nutritional characteristics. Thus, a carrot becomes more likely to evoke the thought of something orange and good for eyes. We feel that this sort of association will bear a strong influence on the kind of food choices the person makes as they grow up.
CONCLUSION
We learned about the many health hazards of obesity and that the best time to challenge this epidemic is in its infancy, specifically in children between seven and eleven-years-old. Fitness and nutrition are the two key solutions to obesity. Having developed several innovative ideas that focused on either fitness or nutrition, we finally chose a concept that tackled nutrition explicitly. Our solution, the Grocery Hunter, teaches children to make smart eating choices, while growing them into smart adult shoppers and easing the lives of their parents during a shopping trip. The Grocery Hunter exemplifies one of many potential new and interesting ways of placing nutritional facts in front of our users during key decision times. Since some children found the questions presented too hard, while others found them too easy, we think that creating an adaptive system would broaden the appeal of the game. We believe that once these and other findings are addressed, the Grocery Hunter has high market potential and would be capable of positively impacting the fight against childhood obesity. In future studies, we plan to develop more game modules that harness the knowledge of additional nutrition specialists. We also intend to explore the relationship between eating behavior changes and game play.
REFERENCES
1. Aoki, N., Ohta, S., Masuda, H., et al. Edutainment Tools for Initial Education of Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus: Initial Diabetes Education with Fun. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 107(Pt 2), IOS Press (2004), 855-859.
2. Berger, K. S. The Developing Person through Childhood and Adolescence. Worth Publishers, 2003.
3. Engvall, J. and McCarthy, A.M. Innovative approaches for teaching children with chronic conditions. Journal of Pediatric Health Care, 10, 5 (1996), 239-242.
4. Freedman, D., Dietz, W., Srinivasan, S. and Berenson, F. The Relation of Overweight to Cardiovascular Risk Factors Among Children and Adolescents: The Bogalusa Heart Study. Pediatrics, 103, 6 (1999), 1175-1182.
5. How to avoid portion size pitfalls to help manage your weight, May 2007. http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/portion_size.html
6. Huang, T.T. and Horlick M.N. Trends in Childhood Obesity Research: A Brief Analysis of NIH Supported Efforts. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 35, 1 (2007), 148-153.
7. Robinson, T. and Killen, J. Obesity Prevention for Children and Adolescents. In Body Image, Eating Disorders, and Obesity in Youth, United Book Press (2001), 261-292. 320
Sun-N-Fun Mobile Home Village, Ltd.
Updated 5/17/2012 - This profile of Sun-N-Fun Mobile Home Village, Ltd. was created using data from Florida Department of State
Sun-N-Fun Mobile Home Village, Ltd.
Sun-N-Fun Mobile Home Village, Ltd. has a location in Fort Myers, FL. Active officers include Morton A Goldberg.
| Filings: | Domestic Limited Partnership (FL - Inactive) |
| Source: | Florida Department of State last refreshed 5/17/2012 |
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