Desk Crit Received: #5

From: Audra Edwards
Date:04/13/08

Hi, Daisy!

Here is some feedback about your game. We discussed some of these items Thursday night.

I really like the design of your game and think that it is a neat way to help someone learn about preparing a meal for a diabetic. I have no knowledge about how to prepare a balanced meal for someone with these special needs, so I found the game to be particular interesting and informative.

The introduction is very appropriate and gives good information about how to participate in the activity. You might want to add a statement about having a piece of paper and a pencil handy to help with calculations.

As we discussed, when the game begins, it would be good to have the information for each food already displayed. It is fun, though, to watch the information appear dynamically! Maybe you could add an instruction that says to mouse over each food for the information and then click on the food to choose it. Remember that I suggested you change the words "portion size" to "number of servings" since this is the typical language used on food labels. I like how the calories are calculated automatically based on the number of servings. If someone accidentally leave the serving size blank, the calculation says NaN- maybe add a message here in case that happens. It may be helpful to put something in the directions about clicking on the total calories button to calculate- someone may not realize that they need to do this and they may just continue on to the next section.

I don't know how difficult this would be, but it would be neat to have an area on the screen that shows the choices that have already been made. For example, when the learner moves on to the bread screen, the information about the meat they chose is still displayed somewhere.

The last suggestion that I have is to not only have the calories calculated for each section, but also the carbohydrates. This is because the game specifies that the calories and carbohydrates are important is preparing a meal for a diabetic. It wouldn't hurt to also include the total amount of fat since that information is included in the nutrition information.

I hope that you find my feedback helpful. I enjoyed your project and think that you have constructed a great educational game!

Audra
PS Please see the attachment for some editing feedback.

Desk Crit Received: #4

From: Sunny (HeuiSeon Lim)
Date:04/12/08

Hi! Daisy!

First of all, I love your concept of the project since I am concerned with how much calories that I intake by the food that I eat. Also, Italian is my favorite dinner menu, but it takes lots of calories and carbohydrate! Therefore, your project will benefit not only people who concern with diabetes, but also most of people like me who want to try not to take more calories and carbohydrate than they should.

I am very impressed with the features such as menu selection, different portion size, especially; the function of auto calculation at the end is very useful! I can’t imagine how much effort and many hours and you spent get all the function working properly.

Here is my suggestion for just little things that nice to have.
1. More Selection of the food: I guess it is always nice to have more choices but you already have most popular items for each section.
2. Some kind of feature that make more noticeable about the different calories of the foods.
3. Some improvement on graphic in general would be nicer. 

Again, you did a very impressive job to make everything working properly. I can’t wait to see you

Desk Crit Received: # 3

From Donna Washington
Date: 2/12/08

Daisy,

I wanted to send you this deskcrit of your Prepare Your Meal project after using in during our Studio Dress Rehearsal. I thought your idea for the activity is definitely delightful, which I believe is one of the requirements for the Blue Sock award. I liked how you provide information regarding the food choices and then give the opportunity for the learner to choose based on comparing and contrast. I also thought how you provide immediate feedback for the learner is important. The user knows immediately if their meal choice is appropriate for the purpose of the activity.

I do have a couple suggestions that you may consider. The first is possibly having a place dedicated to place written step by step directions for the learner. You may remember I had to restart and choose my meal again because I didn't realize I needed to click submit ( I believe that was the name of the button). That would make the activity a little more learner directed, but I'm pretty sure you had that covered already. The only other suggestion I would make is to perhaps have a little content prior to the activity on how one goes about choosing a healthy meal. Maybe some dietary suggestions on the amount of carbs, fats, or sugar a food should contain. It's just a thought, so use what you can and discard the rest.

All in all I enjoyed what you have developed. I believe it's an activity we all could benefit from.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Donna W.

Desk Crit Recived 2

From Scott Foster
Date 04/10/08

Click on the following link to see his Desk Crit:
http://smf95.myweb.uga.edu/bizfusion1/bizfusion/deskcrit.html

Journal Entry 6.2 - It's working :D!!!

I'm really happy that I have gotten my project to work for the dress rehearsal :) I had received precious feedback from Donna, Audra, Scott and Sunny (all their comments/suggestions will be added to this blog). I know there are a lot of things that needs to be improved in my project and I’ll work on them this week. I really have to thank my co-worker, Jin Tang, who helped me to get this project to work the way that I wanted :D.

Observing people interact with my project during dress rehearsal made me realized that some of the functions such as buttons are not very clear for the user. Another thing that people commented was to have a graphic or illustration that would help people’s understanding of the serving size of the food. Overall, people really liked the idea and the concept. Someone came to me and said that they were on a diet and this activity would help them to control their calorie intake.

Nowadays, more and more educational games are becoming a fusion of gaming aspects and real-life simulations, which can also be defined as “serious games” (de Freitas, 2006). And this is exactly what I’m planning to accomplish with my project. I know it would be hard to have a full simulation game going on, but I’ll try to get as close as possible to real-life interactions. That was my idea from the beginning. When I searched about developing games, I realized that military, business, and social and health settings have been developing and implementing simulation games in their instructional programs. According to Cohen (2006), the gaming simulations are intended to help people to learn how to work through the complexities of different context. Thus, I’ll keep trying to work on the “Prepare your meal” game in order to make it to look/feel more realistic.

Reference:

• Cohen, S. (2006). The curricular role for understanding social decisions. In S. Cohen, K. E. Portney, D. Rehberger & C. Thorsen (Eds.), Virtual decisions : digital simulations for teaching reasoning in the social sciences and humanities (pp.47-63). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• de Freitas, S. I. (2006). Using games and simulations for supporting learning. Learning, Media and Technology, 31(4), 343-358.