Diabeatit Lunchbox

Problem

Type 2 diabetes is preventable. Type 1 is not. Kids still meet the topic late, if at all, and the science is easy to flatten into eat this, not that.

Dr. Charles Goldberg, a clinical professor at UC San Diego, asked for an educational tool that could live in places like a clinic waiting room: short, age-appropriate, and actually fun for children 8 to 13.

What I built

Diabeatit is a larger educational game with mini-games around meals, movement, and moderation. I worked on the Lunchbox mini-game, a Spring 2025 continuation of an earlier lunch-packing prototype, in Unity and C# with a WebGL build.

The team split into Development, Design, and Operations. Development continued Lunchbox. Design prototyped Sugar Savers, a two-team insulin and glucose game on a body map, inspired by Among Us, that was not this repo's ship target.

Lunchbox is playable on Unity Play as Lunch-BoxWebGL.

How it works

Players see food categories, nutrients, and what those nutrients do, then pack a lunch. The scoring cares about balance across groups, not a single hero food.

Feedback is real-time. You can change the box and watch the score move, which is the lesson: thoughtful choices compound, and you get to revise.

The waiting-room constraint shaped the loop. A session has to teach something before a name is called, which is why WebGL and a tight packing puzzle mattered more than a long campaign.

Challenges

Clinical accuracy and an 8-year-old audience fight each other. We had to talk about Type 2 prevention without fear, and without implying diabetes is a moral failure.

A high score that only rewards restriction teaches the wrong habit. The design wants balance across food groups, with room to adjust after feedback rather than a fail state.

Two workstreams in one quarter (Lunchbox in development, Sugar Savers in design) meant protecting the playable path. Lunchbox had to remain a complete mini-game even while the broader Diabeatit story was still being invented.

Impact

The game gives clinics and classrooms a way to put Type 2 prevention in a child's hands instead of a pamphlet. Packing a lunch is a concrete action they already understand.

Guidance from Dr. Goldberg kept the content aligned with how this is actually taught, not how engineers guess it should be taught.

What I learned

Educational games fail when the mechanic and the lesson disagree. If the fun is speed and the lesson is balance, players learn speed.

Client work with a clinician is a constraint on tone. Every sentence in the UI is part of the medical communication, not flavor text.

Shipping a mini-game inside a larger vision means cutting. Lunchbox had to be complete on its own. Sugar Savers could stay a prototype without blocking the WebGL build.