The research team deployed the Meals for Monsters app as part of its study and conducted additional interviews in the fact-finding phase. Findings suggested how lightweight tools (that is, apps that are not memory-intensive) could leverage gamification and social mechanisms to facilitate both nutritional engagement and reflection on one’s health in enjoyable ways. To meet these goals, the team is exploring new approaches to social computing that blend together the intrinsic motivations of games with the benefits of crowdsourcing and online learning. Specifically, they are developing new crowdsourced, learner-centered games that aid users in developing food evaluation skills by assessing nutritional content through the crowd’s meals and receiving the crowd’s feedback, while also encouraging long-term engagement through simple reward structures and gamification mechanisms. This research also aims to accomplish the following:

• Create a new model for aggregating and presenting crowdsourced intelligence in the nutrition context by embedding a community board inside a game environment that hosts “in-the-wild” meal photographs that are evaluated by peers as to whether they meet the player’s nutritional goals. 
• Leverage user data to create a well-annotated set of meal photographs and nutritional information that can fuel research on computer vision techniques for assessing the nutritional content of food photos. 
• Identify ways in which this crowdsourced community board can be effectively used as a learning tool for populations with low nutritional literacy.