Adventurous Eating Overview
Teach Your Monster Adventurous Eating is a ground-breaking game that encourages kids to build a better relationship with food and eat a broader range of fruits and vegetables.
Packed full of fun games, it is designed to encourage three to six-year-olds to be braver when trying fruit and vegetables by exploring foods with all five of their senses.
With solid research underpinning the approach, it has been designed in collaboration with Dr Lucy Cooke, an expert in children’s food preferences and eating habits.
Adventurous Eating complements Pre-K/Pre-School and Reception/Kindergarten food education and is inspired by the SAPERE Method.
How does Adventurous Eating work?
The game starts with a party invite for your monster from the host of Adventurous Eating, Bub. Bub has a love of all food and celebrates a food every day with growing, games, and songs. As with all our games (it’s in the name!) the player’s monster is THEIR monster and kids can customise them to their hearts’ content.
The player picks one fruit or veg to start the party. At the party, there is a table for each of the senses. Their monster sits at each one and plays a simple game and children can see how their monster and the other monsters react. Sometimes their monster won’t always like the food they try, and that’s OK—next time, they might!
Every time their monster uses one of its senses with a new fruit or vegetable, they receive a star. These stars unlock the disco party where the child will hear a unique, catchy song for every fruit and vegetable they try.
At the end of every food party players are given a new sticker for their food book — the child can customise the food with a silly face and body parts too. This is a great way for the players to look back at all the different fruit and vegetables their monster has tried!
Then it’s off to bed, where their monster dreams about the food they have tried that day!
In the game there are over 40 different fruit and vegetables to try — food that they may see in supermarkets or at home — so they’re not going to run out in a hurry.
Learn more about our sense minigames
Why and how did we make the game?
Research has shown that over 78% of parents said they struggle to get their child to eat healthily and 82% of parents wished their child would be more adventurous in their eating habits.
Identifying the problem, the idea to tackle the topic came from Peter Usbourne. His firm conviction in how games can have a real impact on early years learning, especially after the success of Teach Your Monster to Read, asked how we could help children form better eating habits – or zap the sugar as he phrased it!
Of course, forming good eating habits is a complex and sometimes emotional issue. Through a challenging process of research, prototyping, and user testing we realised that by using a simple framework we could give children the tools to help them have a more positive relationship with food and get over their reluctance to try new fruit and vegetables.
A key part of the solution was looking at the SAPARE method. This research-backed approach works by getting to use ALL their senses when trying something new – smell, sight, touch, listening, and finally taste.
We combined this with our approach to learning through play and turning each of those senses into a game experience that the child will immerse themselves (and their monster) in. Senses games are framed by an invite from our games host Bub, where a new fruit or vegetable is celebrated every day in a food party (including growing the food) that ends with a song from the fruit or veg itself…
Through this mix of solid pedagogy and storytelling magic children are simply encouraged to explore fruit and veg in the game with the ambition this will lead to them being more curious about trying fruit and veg in the real world.
We of course worked with an expert in this area, in this case, Dr Lucy Cooke. As a psychologist and eating behaviour specialist, her expertise was invaluable in making sure that our approach was correct, and her advice went as far as ensuring we had the right language, sounds, and feedback to steer and encourage children in the right way.
If you’d like to learn more about our work with Dr. Cooke, visit our experts page.
What about the music in Adventurous Eating?
In our experience, kids react well to a catchy tune they can listen, and sing along to. It’s not just a good tune though — it can really help with the learning solidifying the key themes and messages of a game. For Adventurous Eating we wanted a partner to ensure we got the right vibe — a vibe that suited a disco full of dancing broccoli. With multi-talented composer and musician Simon Panrucker we found the perfect partner. His playful music, videos, storytelling, and creativity were exactly what the game needed.
You can check out our ‘Bub loves Food’ song in the game, on Spotify or the sing-a-long version, available on Youtube!
Adventurous Eating is 100% FREE for schools!
All our games are completely FREE to play on computers for everybody, via our website!
The proceeds we receive from games sold in app stores go straight back into our games, helping us create more resources to help children learn. However, schools can also unlock the full version of the Adventurous Eating app for free with a verified school email address.
Meet the team
Dr Lucy Cooke
Psychologist and Child eating-behaviour specialist
Lucy is a chartered Research Psychologist specialising in children’s eating behaviour. Over the past fifteen years, she has been designing and testing methods to improve children’s eating habits. She pioneered the ‘Tiny Tastes’ method to help children learn to love a wider range of vegetables. Her expertise and knowledge have been at the forefront of the game development for over six years.
Learn more about Lucy on our Expert page.
Tim Frost
Illustration and Animation
Tim Frost is an illustrator and animator with a vast wealth of games and television experience under his belt. In the past he’s worked in TV series including Peppa Pig and Hey Duggee. For Teach Your Monster, he is the illustrator for Adventurous Eating, designing characters and backgrounds, as well as animating this game and others. He has also written and drawn our comic strips which can be downloaded from our resources section.
Chris O’Shea
Game Designer and Developer
Chris is a designer, artist and creative technologist with 20 years experience creating games, interactive installations and museum exhibits. Inventing new approaches that explore play, human behaviour and engagement through interaction design and the visual arts. His works and collaborations have been commissioned by the BBC, Barbican, FACT, Design Museum London and Science Gallery Dublin, and shown by British Council Japan, MoMA and Kinetica Art Fair.
Carla Vij
Product Tester and Early Years Teacher
Carla has been in schools and homes for the past four years, testing the game. She has been getting a real insight into what gets the kids excited about the game as well as using her own learnings from being an early years teacher.
Alex Goss
Product Manager
Alex has been responsible for managing and launching two of our literacy games and is incredibly excited to now be leading the Teach Your Monster: Adventurous Eating team. From the science and research behind the game to the creation of Bub and their friends, Alex has been instrumental in guiding the Adventurous Eating team.
