The Feels

Inspiration

When sitting down to brainstorm, our team wanted to create a project around the topic of social good/social justice. We knew that we wanted to target a demographic with a prominent, current issue. Emotional well-being is a difficult thing to navigate for many, especially for those who do not receive the chance to learn healthy coping mechanisms. Our inspiration came from the iPad generation. Our group recognizes that because our youth were born into a world of technology, a lot of their learning stems from mobile apps, websites, etc. Although emotional education through an app is limiting, our goal is to be a foundation for future knowledge and experiences. An informative but also engaging game-like mobile app seemed the best way to achieve this goal for our specific demographic.

What it does

The app highlights six major emotions: happiness, sadness, excitement, anger, confidence, and nervousness. When a child feels a certain way, they can click an emotion button closest to that feeling in order to either de-escalate, validate their emotion or learn about their specific reaction in general. Each emotion button leads the user to three suggestions to satisfy these mentioned intentions. These suggestions can include drawing spaces, educational videos, music listenings, and more.

How we built it

Our group utilized both Figma and Android Studio to build the mobile app. We started in Figma designing the wireframes for the app and the different buttons and icons for it. Then, we prototyped it for the video.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges were probably figuring out how to use Figma in a short amount of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For two of us in our group, we are proud of completing our first hackathons and first app using Figma, as well as creating an app that is focused on doing social good. Overall, we are glad that we worked hard and endured for two days to produce a beneficial project.

What we learned

Overall, we learned how to utilize Figma better and more efficiently for design as well as for Android Studio. We also realized the importance of the brainstorming process and the value of the collaboration of more than one intelligent mind for a good cause.

What's next for The Feels

We believe that The Feels is a great stepping stone for developing similar apps regarding emotional and mental health for younger generations. With further development, this app may be a great resource to implement in classrooms, day-care, etc.