conor

Finding new, engaging and understandable ways to visualise food intake and the data associated with it, is something that many people wish for. The process of recording and monitoring the food you eat is fraught with issues that can deter many people, one of these simply being that people forget, others include the recall process – looking back over the choices you made and processing the data associated with it. With obesity in the UK at high levels and set to rise, it seems like the next logical step to take is to use technology to make it easier for people to monitor their food intake. While letting an application takes care of the data processing and giving the user clear and concise information about their diet.

To see if this is the case and technology can enhance the monitoring and nutritional processing side of a person’s diet, my final year project will look at this. Being a Web Technology student a web application was developed, Plate and Rate lets users upload images of the food, other users of the application then rate and tag these food choices for how closely they believe they match the NHS Eat Well plate.

Plate and Rate makes it easy for you to tag the content, all you have to do is increase or decrease the size of the segments in a pie chart for how much of that food type you think is in the plate you’ve been given to rate. Plate and Rate then collates all of this data and gives you information back on how well you did.

Firstly, Plate and Rate tells you how close you were to the guideline for each plate you uploaded and awards you points for how well you did. Then, the application collates all of your plate data and creates an ‘overall plate’ this is every plate you have uploaded mashed together into one big plate which you can then compare to the guideline. Plate and Rate then plots how far away from the guideline you were for each meal you uploaded allowing for an overview and a progression on how you did. The application also allows for you to view your uploads for the past 7 days for finer control. Plate and Rate also awards you points for how accurately you rated other people’s plates, letting you gain ideas and enhancing your knowledge of balanced meals. This work carries on where a previous project left off – read the results of that project here.

This is currently very exciting and promising research for the future and lets you make it easier to see the food you’re eating over a period of time, simply by uploading images and using the application. The trial is expected to run for three weeks and if you’d like to participate then please visit http://chrisborrowdale.co.uk/participate/ and complete the form. Here you’ll be asked a few questions to assess your current eating habits – to get an even spread of participants.

If you have any queries then please feel free to contact me at chris@chrisborrowdale.co.uk

Below are the slides for a talk I gave at the Lincoln School of Computer Science Research Seminar on October 26th 2011. The talk describes the potential of technology to provide useful support for mental and emotional health issues and provides background to our ongoing EPSRC funded project called ENACT.

Abstract: Mental and Emotional health difficulties are a leading cause of disability worldwide. Interestingly, studies have consistently shown that interpersonal relationships and social support can play a vital role in emotional health and wellbeing. Technologies that effectively support emotional wellbeing are likely to offer significant benefits, both for individuals and for society as a whole. This talk will discuss the potential of social media such as social networking sites, online games and mobile phone applications to provide social support for the emotional wellbeing of users, as well as the design constraints inherent in doing so. The EPSRC-funded project called “Exploring social Networks to Augment Cognitive behaviour Therapy (ENACT),” which is being lead by the Lincoln Social Computing research centre, will be discussed as an example of work in this field.

As mentioned in previous posts, I recently presented a paper at CHI 2011 (available online for free here). At both the academic session itself, and through bumping into people afterwards, one question kept coming up. It is a question that I have often fielded whenever talking about educational games, but which I did not address in the CHI paper (there’s only so much you can fit in a conference paper!) The question is generally along the lines of how to ensure that what people learn while playing a game “transfers” to the real world. I suggest that being in a situation where you are thinking about how to make sure knowledge or skills “transfer” means that you have already made a key games design mistake. You have forgotten why games are interesting – and what they are good at.

In order to explain this position I will refer you first to some research. In my opinion the very best existing example of experimental research on educational game design was carried out by Jacob Habgood at Nottingham University (he’s now head of Serious Games at Sumo Digital). I would recommend interested people to have a look at his thesis or this short paper. Habgood was interested in the relation of the content to be learned and the game play mechanics in the design of educational games. In two studies, he demonstrated experimentally that a game in which the play and learning were not merely placed side by side, but were intrinsically linked, were motivationally and educationally more effective than an almost identical game in which learning was not intrinsic to game play.

In my discussion of how Applied Behavioural Analysis can help guide educational game design, I discuss some very similar points:

”behaviour analysts insist that the “behaviour chosen …. must be the behaviour in need of improvement, not a similar behaviour that serves as a proxy for the behaviour of interest, or the subjects verbal description of the behaviour” (Cooper, Heron & Heward, 2006, p.16). So, whether or not participants have reached a learning outcome should not be judged by their answers to a questionnaire (unless the learning outcome is to improve the learners ability to answer questionnaires). Rather, whether they have reached that learning outcome or not should be observable from the action of the player as they are playing.

Essentially, instruction should not be designed as blocks of play and tests. The play, itself, should be the behaviour that is examined. This is especially important in a computer game, where a teacher is not present to interpret behaviour. So, if the game has been designed to teach industrial chemistry, and a learning outcome is an understanding of the chemical reactions necessary for the extraction of iron from iron ore, the game should take place at the molecular level. It is not appropriate to create a game where people can throw random chemicals into a furnace, then observe the outcomes and answer a multiple choice questionnaire.”

So, why is the question of how to ensure that skills and knowledge learned in a game transfer to the real world the wrong question? Because, if we ensure that educational games are designed so that the skill learned in the game IS the skill we want them to learn – not a proxy thereof – there is no question of transfer. If the game should teach multiplication, then it should involve multiplication as a core mechanic of the game – as demonstrated by Habgood. Multiplication is multiplication!

All of this comes with a caveat – games are not the ideal way to teach everything. Games are interesting, complex systems that allow interaction and trial and error learning. If the thing you want to teach is not an interesting, complex system that allows interaction and trial and error learning – you probably need to find a more appropriate teaching method.

Problems with “transfer” commonly come about due to either not ensuring that the learning is intrinsic to game play, or else because you are teaching something that is not the kind of thing that games are good at teaching.

A quick update about the upcoming CHI 2011 conference, which is taking place between May 6-10th in Vancouver, Canada. A total of five members of LiSC are heading to Vancouver next week for CHI – the worlds leading HCI conference. If you are interested in the work we are doing and will be at CHI, make sure to get in touch for a chat over a coffee (i.e, a beer) at some stage in the week.  In brief summary of why we are going:

Click here for a list of times and places for our presentations

Before the conference gets going, Shaun will be stopping off at the University of Calgary to give a talk entitled “Fear and Loathing in the Social Network: Delivering Serious Applications through Online Social Media.” This talk will essentially be a round-up of ongoing work at LiSC.

Ben is an organizer of a workshop on social games, which will be held on Sunday the 6th May. There’s a heavyweight line-up of games designers signed up so this should be an enlightening and fun event. Mark also has a paper accepted at this workshop entitled “Are you the farmer? Understanding social game player motivation and sustainability”.

Duncan will certainly be attending the awards ceremony, as a full paper that he has collaborated on has won the “Best Paper” award at the conference. This is a huge achievement and we’re delighted for the team, primarily based at the University of Nottingham Mixed Reality Lab. The award is well deserved, despite the misguided censorship of a certain picture! The paper itself is entitled “Automics: souvenir generating photoware for theme parks.” Duncan is, very productively, also author of another paper being presented entitled “Breath Control of Amusement Rides.”

I (Conor) am presenting a full paper entitled “Practical, Appropriate, Empirically-Validated Guidelines for Designing Educational Games.” This paper has won an “Honourable Mention” at the conference, and I’m hoping that means that I’ll also be invited to the awards night knee’s-up!

Derek is presenting a poster entitled “Power Ballads: Deploying Aversive Energy Feedback in Social Media.” We’re hoping to make this an interactive poster presentation, with plenty of awesome powerballads to keep everyone uncomfortably emotional. Derek and Shaun will also be attending the PINC workshop on Persuasion, Influence, Nudge & Coercion through mobile devices, where they are co-authors on a paper about persuasive technology.

All of the relevant papers will be available in our e-prints repository after the conference has taken place. If you want to get in touch with us at the conference, or if you cant make it and want to get in touch about the papers, then don’t hesitate to do so.

See you in Vancouver!