Ninja Kitchen, a Kitchen Safety Game for Middle Schoolers

Ninja Kitchen comes from the Learning Games Lab at New Mexico State University, a development studio and testing space for games and educational tools. The lab sits inside NMSU Innovative Media Research and Extension, which works with universities and agencies on interactive games about math, science, food safety and conservation.

The game was a free browser title for middle schoolers and works as a kitchen safety game in the tradition of restaurant-serving titles such as Diner Dash, as its website puts it. It covers germ theory and proper food handling and follows four steps: clean, separate, cook and chill. That means washing hands and surfaces, avoiding cross-contamination, cooking to the right temperature and refrigerating promptly.

The setting is a cafe staffed entirely by ninjas. The student fills orders from hungry customers quickly and hygienically, washing and slicing produce and cooking meat thoroughly before combining ingredients. Customers who wait too long or get food prepared badly leave without paying.

There are ten rounds, each harder than the last, and each teaches a different part of food handling. In the final levels the contamination that hovered over plates in early rounds becomes invisible. If a student still does well there, the teacher can see that the safety messages stuck and that the student is tracking which foods are clean.

The developers tested the game with middle school students who knew little about food safety. Afterward the students knew significantly more about safe cooking and danger-zone temperatures for meat, fish and poultry, cared more about eating safe food and felt more confident preparing it.

The Ninja Kitchen website loads, but the game is not offered in a way that works in current browsers. The page states that the Flash modules were removed after Adobe blocked Flash content from January 12, 2021, and that the game is only playable on platforms that support Adobe Flash and is not supported on mobile devices. It invites visitors to ask for a notice list of upgraded games.

The page credits the NMSU Board of Regents with a 2011 copyright and names the National Institute of Food and Agriculture of the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the funder. NMSU Innovative Media Research and Extension also has a working website.