July 2021 for Action on Sugar

Food Flips – Online Top Trumps

A fun interactive game for primary aged children

Action On Sugar is a team of Nutritionists based at Queen Mary University of London, who were awarded a grant to develop an interactive animated online version of a game they created during the first lockdown in 2020.

Example of how the Food Flips game would look like on a laptop

In Food Flips, players choose the nutrient on their card that they think is lower than the computer’s card (a bit like Top Trumps). The game has four different difficulty levels. Level one is based on colours (green beats amber, amber beats red). The highest level uses number values to provide more of a challenge, so the game is accessible to children with a range of different abilities.

The game is designed to teach kids how to read and understand traffic light labels and to develop a sense of what’s in their food without ever labelling any food as good or bad.

A grid of playing cards featuring cartoon food items and the traffic light style nutritional information
An image showing some of the Food Flips characters

Building the game was great fun and we were really lucky to have such great character designs to start with.