Activity Ideas for the Classroom

This is an idea for using wikis in the classroom using the relate-donate-create model of Kearsley and Shneiderman's (1999, p: 1).

Topic: Healthy Food Options for School and Home
Problem to Solve: Kids complain about boring food in their lunch box, parents struggle to come up with interesting ideas that are also nutritious and easy to prepare, and schools are also under pressure to provide nutritious food options. Other linked issues: childhood obesity, massive options of readily available processed foods and fast foods, kids/parents struggling to identify healthy food options, misconceptions that healthy food won't taste nice etc.)
Audience: broad audience but primarily targeting families.
Tasks (expected to span over a full term):
1. Create a questionnaire targeting the school community about thoughts, opinions, knowledge regarding healthy food, food preferences, childhood obesity, challenges around healthy lunchbox and meals at home, what influences their choices, the canteen menu etc. Students can brainstorm and come up with suitable questions and create a questionnaire on the wiki site for students and parents to respond to.
2. Research: childhood obesity, 5 food groups, advantages/disadvantages of processed fast foods, definition of what constitutes "healthy food" and advantages/disadvantages, common misconceptions etc. This can be done in groups. Each group are to create a wiki page under the main wiki "Healthy Food Options for School and Home". All students are encouraged to review each other's pages and make comments.
3. Each group can then brainstorm ideas for creating their own simple guide for selecting food/meals or they can choose to use an existing one (such as from this website http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/foodlabels/trafficlights/) and tweak it based on any information that they have found out. This could also be set up on a wiki page, so that students can contribute ideas at any time, but be removed at a later date when the guide is completed.
4. In groups, students will be responsible for one of the following: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and dessert. Each group will be required to find recipes and rate them (based on their nutritious food guide). They will be encouraged to try some of their recipes and rate them using a simple star rating. They will also be encouraged to find out what other cultures (e.g. italian, chinese, greek, french, indonesian) might do for each of these categories. A wiki page will be set up for each of the categories (breakfast, lunch etc) including the nutritious food guide the students have created.
5. Vote: This could be a class or school vote about which group came up with the most variety and interesting recipes for their page.
6. From their list, the students could then select a few recipes that they have tried, liked and are easy to prepare and present that to the P&C to offer variety to the canteen. It could be that each Friday there is a cultural theme - one week = pasta (Italian), week 2 = Californian rolls (or sushi) (USA/Japan), week 3 = fried rice (chinese) etc.
7. The wiki will then be available to the public for students and parents (or anybody really) to add recipes of their own, comment about and rate recipes, or simply to get some ideas.

If anyone happens to read this, some feedback would be great.

Reference:

Kearsley, G., & Shneiderman, B. (1999). Engagement theory: a framework for technology-based teaching and learning. retrieved from http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm