Hello there,

Welcome to our second blog post! In this week, we completed our second school visit out of the four flexible learning sessions.

The first weekly objective of our project is to collect data of students’ food preferences by distributing surveys and then analyze and draw a conclusion of the consumption trend based on the results. The results are used to modify and improve our well designed tasty, nutritious and economical recipe for the next visit. The second weekly objective is to integrate nutrition into the cooking session of the homework club by providing a recipe to them and help them prepare food materials required for Thursday. We aimed to introduce healthy substitutes for the unhealthy food ingredients that are commonly consumed by using posters to show comparisons between peanut butter and chickpeas as the filling of sandwich based on nutrition, such as calories and content of the major nutrients. Hopefully, students can get to know more about nutrition and embrace the idea of healthy eating after trying a new taste of sandwich with healthy legumes.

Let’s check out our nutritious recipe and poster for this week’s homework club.

Chickpea Salad Sandwich Spreading (using 19 oz chickpeas)

Ingredients:

½ onion (can replace with bell pepper for a lighter flavor)

1 celery stalk

1 can chickpeas

2 tbsp mayonnaise

1 tbsp lemon juice

1 tsp dried dill weed (optional)

some salt & pepper

After this week’s school visit, we get to know more about students’ preferences regarding to snacks provided in the homework club and their ideas towards our 1^st designed recipe. The analysis of students’ preferences is based on students’ answers to our survey questions. In our survey, we have general Questions as follows:

What are your favorite foods to eat?

What do you usually eat for lunch?

What is your favorite food that you consider healthy and why?

Do you cook for yourself at all? If so, what do you like to make?

What snacks would you like to eat at homework club?

Moreover, we will also receive some feedbacks from students’ answers to the questions that are designed specifically for the 1^st recipe and the questions are as follows:

Do you like PB&J sandwiches? Why?

Do you like chickpea salad sandwiches and want to eat them more often? If yes, is it because of the flavor or the nutrition values of chickpeas, or both? If no, why?

Do you want to eat chickpea salad sandwiches more often? Even more than PB&J?

We discussed our first Thursday workshop plan with the school teacher and the homework club coordinator on this Wednesday. Initially, however, the plan was not seen as applicable to help students achieve learning goals by the school teacher and this was because the interesting activities to attract students’ engagement were missed out from our workshop plan. Students’ engagement motivation would be depressed if the workshop was tedious. Game-based learning has become a significantly important issue in education because games may be highly useful for improvement of student’s active participation in learning by offering attractive and academic content (Hsieh et al., 2013). Ultimately, our group modified our workshop plan and incorporated some learning activities in our workshop plan, such as guessing game for food ingredients in the recipe. In future visits, I will recommend that more game-based learning activities are incorporated into the workshop to facilitate students’ learning.

Our objective for next week’s visit is to introduce natural healthy food ingredients to substitute commonly used sugar added to snacks. Moreover, we will try to get feedbacks of our next weeks’ workshop and students’ snacks preference. In order to achieve those goals, in next week’s visit, we will provide a recipe to the homework club and prepare the food required. Then questionnaires will be given to the teacher to help us distribute to students. In next week, we will make raw brownie ball. The questions based on next week’s recipe are as follows:

Do you like cocoa?

Can you list your favorite snack(s) made of cocoa?

Do you like nuts? Why?

What can we use to increase the sweetness of our food?

References

1. Hsieh, Y.; Lin, Y.; Hou, H. Exploring Elementary-School Students’ Engagement Patterns in a Game-Based Learning Environment. Journal of Educational Technology & Society 2015, 18, 336.

 

Updates coming soon!

–Kelly (Xiaozi) Chen (on behalf of group 22: Shirley, Lucy, Vita, Sharon, Ya and Kelly)