18_Mental Health_QUAB

Run out of ideas what to do? Why not play some funny and surprising mini games with your friends? How? Easy! Invite QUAB to your chat group. The bot will always provide you with fun & uplifting games!

Comment 1

Problem & Vision

In quarantine there is the danger of falling into a trot, which is not only boring but can also lead to depressive moods due to the lack of social interaction, goals & tasks. For this reason we wanted to develop something that can break this rut. We believe that even small daily highlights can do this. Highlights that are created together with your friends despite physical distance. Highlights that are creative and unusual. Highlights that awaken joie de vivre and make you laugh.

Our Way

With the help of the Design Thinking process and its methods we started to work on the topic. After we had developed a basis of understanding and empathy for the situation, we started to create different ideas and concepts. The one idea we were all excited about was based on two observations of the current situation that we found particularly exciting: newly emerging social media challenges similar to the Ice Bucket Challenge and increased activity in WhatsApp chat groups. We thought: How might we help existing groups of friends to get out of the boring rut despite of physical distance with little funny challenges and games.

QUAB

Our solution - QUAB: Quarantaine Activity Bot - is a WhatsApp chatbot that can be invited into any existing WhatsApp group. After a short introduction of the bot, each member can use #QUAB to invite the bot to share a fun challenge. The bot briefly describes which activity (e.g. Banana Hat - Who can balance the most bananas on his head?) has to be mastered by all members. The participants then decide themselves who has completed the challenge best and thus won.

Inspiration

  • Challenges on Instagram
  • ICQ Mini Games
  • Slack bots
  • Thomas WG

What it does

  • Provide all members of a Whatsapp group on request with a creative and fun challenge that they have to tackle.
  • Gives joy and reason to interact

How we built it

Ideation: Miro, draw.io Prototyping: Whatsapp, Adobe Premiere, iMovie Realization: node.js, express.js, angular.js, whatsapp, mongodb

Challenges we ran into

  • Remote Workshop
  • Technical Limitations of Whatsapp
  • Time

Accomplishments that we are proud of

  • We tested it with a fake bot and we all had a blast doing the challenge
  • We run a fully remote workshop

What we learned

  • How the current situation impacts people and their lifes
  • How to do a remote workshop using Miro
  • That many people have great ideas on how to make an apparently bad situation fun and motivating

What's next for 18_Mental Health_QUAB

In the next steps we would implement our existing technical concept and continue to work on creative challenges to expand our bot. Furthermore, we are planning a jury that will be automatically drawn from the WhatsApp group for each challenge. It is the jury's task to determine the winner. We are also planning a categorization to select tasks from different topics and a website to give the community the opportunity to submit new challenges. After we have left COVID-19 behind us, we will continue with fun outdoor challenges!

Share this project:

Updates

posted an update —

On the first day of the Hackathon, the use of design thinking methods helped us to set a focus. We decided to develop a bot that can be used in chat groups with friends. When the bot is addressed, it suggests small games and competitions to the group members that can be played during quarantine.

Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.

Submission history