Hey, Internet, how’s it going? That’s cool. Me? I’m pretty good, been checking out ZisBoomBah. It’s a website meant to teach kids about healthy eating, especially about choosing foods to make up a healthy meal. It’s pretty cool, since it involves the rare combination of bright colors, cartoon characters, computer games, and healthy food choices (basically every junk food company out there seems to have a zany, cartoonish site full of games. I dare you to google a few). Basically, you head over to the site, you sign up (kids can’t sign up without parents also signing up, which is actually cool because ZisBoomBah has some kid-parent connectivity features I’ll explain in a minute) you create an “Anvatar,” a cartoony ant character for your username (I have no idea why they’re ants) and you start exploring the site. The main attraction is the Pick Chow section, where you put together a meal from a big selection of different foods, and try to get a perfect 5-star meal by balancing stuff like protein and fiber with saturated fats and sodium. I like that you can have dessert, but only if the rest of the meal gets five stars, and the dessert can’t make you lose a star. I managed to make a few delicious meals, but it can be tough. The best part is when kids make a healthy meal they like, they can send a shopping list to their parent’s username on the site, and eat that meal in real life! It’s pretty fun, too. Definitely more fun than writing a shopping list down on paper. There’s pictures of the food I’m about to eat!
The other cool thing about ZisBoomBah is the Play section, which I thought would be some online games to help kids learn about nutrition. I was so wonderfully wrong! Play is full of activities that involve actual exercise and have little or nothing to do with computers! The web is a great tool for helping kids learn about being healthy, but sitting in front of a computer is not actually good for you (thus the great paradox of the 21st century) and the Play section is a wonderful way to solve that. In fact, from the Pick Chow section to the Chef Recipes to the activities in Play, ZisBoomBah seems to be all about getting off the internet and into a healthy, fun lifestyle, and you, Internet, should get excited about that.