Development and application of a manual and virtual game for food education for children with Down Syndrome

Abstract

Games provide fun and can serve as a tool for learning and behavior change. Thus, the objective was to develop and apply a manual and virtual game to work on food education forchildren with Down Syndrome, with or without food allergy, seeking to instruct and compare the efficiency of the methodologies used through play. For the development of the virtual game software, the construction platform Delphi 10.1 Berlin Starter Edition was used, simulating a supermarket for the purchase of food. For the development of the manual game, cards that simulated the same situation were used. After making and approving the ethics committee (nº 2,094,016), the games were applied to 60 children from a social organization in Fortaleza-CE in the age group from 5 to 11 years old, 22 of whom were allergic children. Allergic children were taught through games to avoid consuming allergenic food. Children without allergies have been taught to avoid the consumption of foods that are bad for their health. The children were divided into two groups of 30 and questions were asked to assess their learning. It was observed that 48.32% of the children responded correctly with the virtual game, 43.33% responded correctly with the manual game and 8.35% were wrong, with 1.67% errors with the virtual game and 6.68% errors with the manual game. It was observed that it was easier to learn with the virtual game. Therefore, the use of games to carry out children's food education proved to be a good teaching/learningstrategy