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Aurora Screens
Inspiration
During COVID-19, we noticed an increase in online gaming with youth & young adults as well as an increase of negative mental health effects. Angela’s inspiration for the app stemmed from looking for a way to promote children’s mental health awareness through gaming. As a team, we wanted to communicate mental health strategies and mindful thinking in a way that was fun and easy to digest for the young audience.
What it does
The app aims to create a fun and interactive experience that can help youths (6-11) learn more about their feelings and mental health through different ACT/CBT techniques. It also includes an integrative AI chatbot function that allows users to freely express their thoughts. We feel that the production of this app would prove valuable for the youth during these times as it addresses the mental distress that children, who may not necessarily have an outlet, are feeling. We’re striving to do this through interactively educating the children on healthy coping techniques as well as maintaining a daily schedule to attain a sense of stability in these challenging times.
How we built it
Design: The prototype was assembled in Figma. Designs were backed by user research, competitive analysis, and interviews with mental health experts, behavioral psychologists, and therapists.
Development: Our developers' team used React Native as the primary framework for building this app. We split the app into different features and assigned each developer a feature to work on, these features were login/signup, user authentication, character selection, chat, and storytime. In the end, we combined all the features through Github repo. For backend, we are using MongoDB to store user login/signup data.
Challenges we ran into
Design: Recruiting users and conducting user interviews in the time of Coronavirus was a unique challenge we've struggled with in the past. Figuring out how to find participants in our specified age range took a lot of recruiting and networking.
Development: One of the challenges that the developers' team faced was the unfamiliarity with React Native. Although all of us had experience with React, it took time to understand React Native and how to fully utilize it.
Illustration: Although we have a bigger team for our second hackathon, that came with its own challenges as well. One of the challenges is managing people from various time zones, which can be tough to coordinate a meeting that all can be available.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Design: Going out of our way and connecting with all types of mentors and subject matter experts was integral to our design process. They were able to provide us with tips, techniques, and leads that were enormously beneficial and insightful when we needed to validate the effectiveness of our designs.
Illustration: We were able to make the app much livelier, especially for our young users to keep them interested and engaged. One of our characters had a variety of facial expressions this time, and there were more movements and animations onto the props of the app.
Proud of the hard work everyone put forth for the creation of this app in such a short period of time!
What we learned
Development: We learned that team collaboration and communication is what makes this journey enjoyable and successful!
Design: Going out of our way and connecting with all types of mentors and subject matter experts was integral to our design process. They were able to provide us with tips, techniques, and leads that were enormously beneficial and insightful when we needed to validate the effectiveness of our designs.
Illustration: Having more people onto the team provided more insights we didn’t know about, especially for our art division. Some of our illustrators gave suggestions we would not have thought of on our own, especially those with more expertise in the field.
What's next for Calm On! 2.0
Going forward, more user testing will be conducted on our designs and prototype in order to iterate and improve upon what we have so far. We would like to do a deeper exploration into the gamification of the app in order to encourage players to come back and check in often with the incentive of in-game rewards and customization. With more support, we will continue adding more character animations, mindfulness techniques, storylines, and other content in order to keep the app informative and exciting as time goes on. We will also look into the ways artificial intelligence could enhance the personalities and dialogue options of our characters. Though this app was designed with the intention that the children could use it by themselves or with a parent, we hope to potentially partner with therapists in the future in order to provide more personalized therapy experiences for their younger clients.
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