Kids Health Notes give-away: Match Master electronic game
August 2, 2008 by Grace Ibay
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
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.
They ride bikes.
Hit the beach !!
We bike ride!
Swimming – it’s one of the few sports that can save your life.
Going on a treasure hunt. They will walk a lot more trying to find items on their list plus its more fun that way.
My kids would love this. Please enter me, thank you
We love taking our dogs for walks.
family bike rides & walks
we go swimming and ride our bikes
We skateboard at the park.
Badminton – easy to set up and take down in the backyard.
We’re off to bike right now!
Biking !!
we take the dogs for a walk
we go for walks or bike rides
I limit the kids’ TV watching/electronics, and everyone plays at least one sport…regular exercise every day after school too.
limit time spent on electronic games each day
and have a good sturdy bike and basketball
available..
My son is active anyway haha but I sign him up for baseball!
We go biking.
We go on hikes.
I made sure my kids were active when they were very little so now that they are a little older it is part of their lifestyle, not a hassle.
Take them to the playground and also get them involved in sports.
My kids play sports.
We keep a box of balls, bats, gloves, etc. in the back yard. When kids come over, we insist that they all play in the yard. They run around until all hours of the night.
nice prize for grankids!
Family bike rides and walks.
we all walk together+kids involved in sports.
My grand kids love me to challange them at Wii bowling, but maybe they think they are getting Gramma to work out. LOL
the boys play baseball all summer
It’s hard to get my girls interested in competitive sports, so we encourage gymnastics and figure skating.
I get out there with them–they’ll play anything if I play along.
we are always at the beach. playing
TV and video game time is limited–even if I have to unplug it. My son’s room is devoid of these things–they are in the living room. I also turn on the CD player and we’ll dance around. Basketball, baseball, etc. are encouraged as well. Thank you for the contest!
I want one !!
We walk and bicycle as much as possible.
There’s a part of every afternoon which is outside time and they actually look forward to that. I come up with fun things to do and games to play and it gets them moving. Also the neighborhood tends to play community games in the evening so they get out there again for games of hide and seek and tag, etc!
we do fun stull like go to the beach and the park
I want to win
go to the park or go swimming
the playground! or anything outside.
I keep the children active by going on walks a lot.
Kids are grown, but we keep our granddaughter active by swimming, playing soccer, ballet class and running around playing with her 18 month old sister!
My 3 boys are always going…inside, we love running and jumping games…and outside, anything with a ball! Our new fav this summer is the frisbee! That keeps us running b/c we haven’t perfected our “toss” yet!
They are very active on their own and always have been.
My kids are going to start soccer in a few weeks,love the game to practice
I encourage them to sign up for programs our Park and Recreation program offers.
Ride bikes
We go biling and walking on our county trail.
Since there isn’t any sandlot baseball anymore – I pay to have them in organized sports, although it is costly when travel is involved.
Two of my boys spend about 10 hours a week in martial arts. I also let them dig up parts of the back yard, so they can build bicycle courses.