Healthy Eating Webquest
Intended Audience: Middle School Science/Health
Educational Goal: Students will understand what makes up good nutrition. They will understand how to read a nutrition label on food, count calories and find healthy alternatives to some foods they may be used to eating.
Curriculum Standards: Not stated in the Webquest
The way this webquest is presented to students gives them a real word problem to solve which will increase student’s motivation and desire to complete the task. The webquest uses deductive strategies by giving students guidelines of calories to make a meal plan. This will allow students to see how healthy foods are and create a diet plan that they can actually use. This webquest is scaffolded by first having students look up some of their favorite foods and identify the number of calories to see if they are healthy. This will give students practice looking up different foods before they create their own diet plans.
The webquest uses different internet sites to help students find foods and their calories to make a diet plan. This could however also be done with photocopies. Below is a screen shot of one of the resources the webquest provides.
Several popular foods and their calories could be printed out and handed out to students for them to reference. The use of technology in this webquest does little more than help save paper and to make the process a little bit faster. Technically the webquest does work and none of the links are flawed.
To improve this webquest I would include a place online where students could compile their diet plans. If possible something that has an interactive user experience to make the plans easy to manipulate and reorganize. Then all of these diet plans could be posted in one location so that students can see each other’s diet plans. This will allow students to get more ideas beyond just what they have come up with and have the activity have more meaning for the students.
The webquest can be found here: diet plan webquest
The name of the author of the webquest was not displayed.
Evaluation by: Eric Dionne
