Little Chef

Introduction

Getting children to eat healthy food has always been an issue. Today however that problem has reached catastrophic levels, with obesity on the rise it is important that children are taught to eat healthy food from the start. Force feeding is not an option, as children are beginning to assert their independence sooner than they did ten or may be even five years ago. Telling them to eat healthy food is not going to work. Therefore its important to get buy-in from them with regards to eating healthy. With Little Chef we aimed to address that issue. The idea was to develop an application that would allow a parent or a babysitter to get buy-in from children on what to eat, the parent or the babysitter could set a secret ingredient that the cartoonish chef in the application would suggest the children eat, and ask the children for their opinion on what other ingredients they would want to have. Since children are a party to decision making process, it would result in a sense of responsibility or ownership towards the end product and they would be more likely to eat the said dish. Given a long enough time period, the children would grow used to eating healthy food and continue with the habit as they start to assert their independence.

The scenario presented below is that of a babysitter trying to get buy-in from the kids as the parents head out for date night. We came up with the personas for the family and also the babysitter. The detailed personas wireframes and a demo rendering of the final concept is presented below.

This was done as a class project. The website for the project is hosted at click here.

Personas

Sarah Mackenzie

• Age: 16
• Job: high school sophomore student
• Likes: cooking, txting, soccer
• Dislikes: fighting

Sarah is a regular babysitter for the Harts family. She is a skilled cook, so the Harts family wants her to cook for the two children. As a result, Sarah wants to cook meals that everyone will agree to eat. She is babysitting to save up money to go to Europe with her friends for the summer.

Ruth Les

• Age: 6
• Job: mommy’s princess
• Likes: playing games, helping the babysitter, doing what grown-ups do
• Dislikes: her brother Hart

Ruth is the older of the two siblings whose goal is to get Hart in trouble.

Hart Les

• Age: 4
• Job: wuss
• Likes: sleeping, eating candy
• Dislikes: vegetables

Hart is the younger of the two siblings who is allergic to peanuts. He helps others out because he doesn’t want to feel left out. Mostly, he tries to avoid getting himself into trouble.

Wireframes

Demo