Spoons: Understanding the Obstacles of Chronic Illness

What It’s All About

The “spoon theory” is a commonly used explanation of how people living with mental and physical disabilities have limited energy every day, and how they must budget that energy across every action they take. We created this project around the idea of explaining that theory using a short simulated day in the life of a person who uses spoon theory, and going through everyday actions, but with the threat of “will I have enough spoons later?” over the head of the user with every choice made.

From Beginning to End

We went through a few iterations of how, exactly, we'd simulate this life. We played around with some text-based adventures for a while, but eventually landed on something more visual, with buttons and options to pick from as you traverse through this person's day. Using HTML and CSS to create the user's playing space, and creating a little character to draw in various situations as the simulation continues, we did our best to make a nice little world where the user could learn about spoon theory in a calm and beautiful environment.

Obstacles We Faced

Initially we intended on building a complex simulator using an integration of Python and HTML. After installing Flask through the terminal, we realized it would be best to be efficient with our time limit. We ended up using HTML and CSS only, but still felt we were able to convey the core meaning of our work. Regarding HTML, we felt some obstacles as we were adding animations and links.

What We Accomplished

In the end, our simple little "spoonie" ended up with a basic yet informative day as they traveled throughout their daily activities, guided by the user, who, at the same time, was learning more about spoon theory and the difficulties of living with limited energy (while we, ourselves, were creating this with very limited time). We hope that, as simple as it may be, this experience provides the users with some new knowledge and understanding on the spoon theory, and how mental and physical disabilities affects those around you in ways you may not have noticed previously.

Built With

Submitted to

TeenHacks LI - Fall 2019
- Winner Best Beginner Hack

Created by

When I came to this hackathon, I initially expected to work on brainstorming/concept development and graphic design (as I had next to no experience with coding prior to attending). While I did hold these roles on the team, I also ended up doing most of the coding and created all of the pages using HTML and CSS using the knowledge I gained from the TeenHacks LI workshops, which was a super cool learning experience.

Athena Yao
I came up with the idea of basing our project on spoon theory, as it is a theory that I use for myself in my daily life and I thought it’d be nice if there was an easy way to explain the theory to those who don’t know about it. I further contributed by designing the little character that the user controls, as well as drawing them in a majority of the situations presented throughout the simulation.

Delaney Skelton
I initially wanted to build the logic of the site with python. I spent a few hours figuring out how to combine python with html using flask. I felt good about doing this. Then, as our idea evolved a bit more, I realized we didn't need python if we wanted to be efficient. I helped troubleshoot the html and css. I drew a lot of the artwork using my drawing tablet.

Ankitha Varanasi
I worked on editing the graphics with the drawing tablet as well as development of the design layout for the website. Additionally, I worked to create the story of the game and the different stages of the day the character has to go through to properly explain the spoon theory and help people understand the difficulties of having a chronic illness.

Abigail Colaco