Our+Game+Plan

Today, we had a very productive team meeting where we laid out some general plans for this semester. Instead of working on a group of bugs, we intend to create a new nutrition activity geared toward the young American users of OLPC laptops. Because the available foods and differing laws regarding food products in other countries, we are specifying this activity for Americans.

The main concept is just a food journal that will display how healthy the user's day was. For example, if the user inputs that he ate fast food and soft drinks, the "Health-o-meter" will be low. On the other hand, if the user inputs salad and water, the "Health-o-meter" will increase. If the user leaves out a food group on a certain day, we will display some advice telling them to eat more of that food group tomorrow.

We began to separate certain tasks into general categories. For instance, we will create a database that will contain general possibilities for food and drinks. The user will be able to narrow down what he ate. For instance, he will start with Meat & Poultry, then choose Chicken, then Fried Chicken. We will have simple portion sizes that correspond to the size of the child's fist: 1 fist, 2 fists...

We will also need to create a GUI with graphics corresponding to the user input. The Health-o-meter will not only go up and down but also change colors. If the user reaches the top level of the Health-o-meter, we will include some kind of congratulatory graphic such as fireworks at the top of the Health-o-meter.

Of course, to gauge the user's health, we will need some kind of algorithm. We will limit the possibilities of input values but allow them to be general enough to contain most of a child's diet. We will use these input values in an algorithm that we will work on throughout this project.