Activities/TurtleNutrition

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What is Turtle Nutrition

Turtle Nutrition is a programmatic way to explore the nutritional content of the foods we eat.

Turtle Nutrition is a fork of Activities/Turtle Art that includes blocks to extract the nutritional content of food. These data can be used to plot charts, create formulas, calculate the nutritional content of recipes, and maintain a log of food eaten.

Where to get Turtle Nutrition

http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/TurtleNutrition-202.xo

How to use Turtle Nutrition

Please refer to the Activities/Turtle Art pages for basic instructions on how to use the block interface and the details of various toolbars.

get calories: returns a number that corresponds to the number of calories in a food item
get protein: returns a number that corresponds to the amount of protein in a food item
get carbohydrates: returns a number that corresponds to the carbohydrates in a food item
calories eaten: the number of calories eaten
protein eaten: the amount of protein eaten
carbohydrates eaten: the amount of carbohydrates eaten
get fiber: returns a number that corresponds to the amount of fiber in a food item
get fat: returns a number that corresponds to the amount of fat in a food item
eat: consume a food item and add its nutritional content to the total amount eaten
fiber eaten: the amount of fiber eaten
fat eaten: the amount of fat eaten
digest meal: reset the nutritional content eaten to zero
get name: returns the name of a food item as a string
add food: (in versions 202.1+) the 'add food' block lets the user add new foods to the food palette

food blocks: various foods that can be used with the program. See below for instructions on how to modify the activity to add your own foods: apple, banana, orange, cake, cookie, bread, corn, potato, sweet potato, tomato

In the example below [1], the "get calories" block is used to extract the number of calories in several foods. Those data are then used in a bar chart.

Learning with Turtle Nutrition

Most activities around learning about nutrition as based on the relaying of facts and advice. This activity offers a different approach: computation.

forward get_calories banana

Extending Turtle Nutrition

While it is not trivial to extend Turtle Nutrition, it provides a good opportunity for exploration.

Have the learners make lists of common foods
Make or find pictures of these foods
Look up the nutritional content of these foods: calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat [2]
Create SVG images for the foods similar to [3]
Edit food.py [4] to add your new foods to the food palette

Note: As of version 202.1, there is an "add food" block that will replace Steps 4 and 5 above.

Feel free to ask for help if needed.

Reporting problems

Please file bugs at [5].

To list all open tickets of Turtle Nutrition, see [6].

Credits

Walter Bender wrote and maintains the code.
Brian Silverman is the first author of Turtle Art.