Homeschool Fruit

My friend Nancy Bea just wrote about how in her family when kids want to eat ice cream and cookies they first have to eat a piece of fruit.

I immediately wondered if this would work with homeschooling. Imagine, for example, that the kids want to play SimCity... can I ask them first to write or add or read? Perhaps the clue is figuring out what the educational equivalent of fruit is. We're not talking Swiss Chard here (read: workbooks). The idea is to help them find something so enjoyable and fulfilling that they might not need the SimCity fix after all, or if they did, they'd already be mostly full of nourishing things and one wouldn't mind so much.

[Note: SimCity is perhaps like homemade oatmeal raisin cookies... sweet and sugary but with many redeeming values nonetheless.]