Objects for Categorization
Explore how to categorize and organize meal data using JavaScript objects. Learn to create key–value pairs for meals, calculate totals by category, and extend objects to include additional properties like protein. Practice building an interactive meal tracker with AI assistance to strengthen your understanding of data structures and real-world coding.
You’ve been tracking daily calories, but they’re just numbers in a single list. To make the data more useful, you can organize meals by type: for example, keep all breakfasts together, all lunches together, and all dinners together. Structuring the data makes calculating per-meal totals and seeing patterns over time easier.
Typing just:
Breakfast: 400Lunch: 600Dinner: 300
It's nice, but it doesn’t help you calculate totals for each category.
What you need is an object, a structure that stores data as key–value pairs so you can categorize and organize calories by meal type.
Your project: Build “Healthy Meals Object Tracker” that groups meals into categories (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner), calculates totals for each, and shows the overall daily total.
The programming concept
Imagine you’re making a contacts app. If you only had an array, it might look like:
["Alice", "123-4567", "Bob", "987-6543"]
A plain list of numbers doesn’t tell ...