Kids Health Notes give-away: Match Master electronic game

Children do best when interaction is part of learning. When you’re trying to teach a child about the importance of nutrition and fitness, it helps to illustrate “what happens if-” and have kid experience the payoff of keeping healthy.

The David Beckham Academy has come up with a cool electronic handheld soccer game – MatchMaster – that teaches kids all about managing their health. In the virtual sports game, a player simulates proper nutrition, exercise and adequate rest to increase health and performance. The claim to fame of the MatchMaster is that it is a great soccer training aid for kids since it highlights the importance of a good diet, exercise and the need to train regularly to improve and maintain skill.

In MatchMaster, each gamer has a virtual player (that I nicknamed “Dave”) and set up a “daily routine planner” for it where I had to select at the right time food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, schedule a fitness program and sufficient sleep. After a week of trial and error in training, I was able to gain a healthy lifeline for Dave. The better I was at maintaining a healthy lifestyle (nutrition, training and sleep) through inputs in the daily routine planner, the stronger “Dave” got and the better he was at playing the interactive soccer games. One time “Dave” got injured, and that prevented me from playing in the games. Instead I was adviced to get some physio therapy, recuperate and eat better. If the objective of the game is to have kids become more conscious of their health, the food they eat and seeing the body get stronger with each week of training, then this game has accomplished its goal with my trial. With enough skill, I could even have challenged other gamers in the interactive Infrared games.

MatchMaster was launched at Walmart stores in June and has a retail price of $19.96. A sweepstakes campaign also coincides with the launch and will run through September 1, 2008 at midnight. The grand prize is a trip for ten to London to attend a David Beckham Academy Course. A total of $150,000.00 in prizes is given away. Details of the sweepstakes are available inside each package and online at the www.davidbeckhamacademy.com

Now for the give-away: I have two MatchMaster games (blue and light blue cover) as prizes, and it’s easy to join -

• Just share your thoughts in the comments: “How do you get your kids physically active?”
• One entry per person per day
• It’s open to residents of the 48 contingent US states only.
• Contest ends 12:00 midnight EST on August 17, 2008 (Sunday). Two winners will be randomly chosen and announced via blog and email the week after.
• If the winner does not reply within 3 days, he/she forfeits her winnings and an alternate winner will be chosen.