Get Back to Green
"Get Back to Green" is an interactive storybook designed to educate young children on emotion regulation. Using augmented reality, the book brings coping strategies to life, providing readers with a toolkit to process BIG FEELINGS.
This project was developed in close collaboration with mental health professionals and elementary school teachers to address the lack of engaging resources for teaching emotion regulation.
Tools
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe After Effects
Mattercraft
Role
Researcher
Illustrator
Animator
AR Developer
Awards
1st Place at The Ohio State Denman Research Forum for Pediatric and Family Healthcare
Duration
4 Months (2023)
Why wait until college to teach students how to cope?
For my undergraduate thesis, I initially set out to design a mental health resource to support college students with generalized anxiety disorder. I began my research by consulting with mental health professionals to understand why GAD is so common amongst this demographic.
I learned that this phase of life is a major transitional period where many students suddenly have an influx of responsibilities. An overwhelming amount of stress, such as this, often manifests as anxiety within the body. Many college students have yet to master healthy coping mechanisms to manage stressors of this extremity. With resources on campus, it is common for students seek out counseling where professionals can help students develop these skills.
After learning this, I posed the question, “why are we waiting until students enter this phase of life to teach them how to effectively cope with stress?”
Are younger students learning coping skills?
To answer this question, I began researching mental health education standards. To my delight, I learned that there is a Social and Emotional Learning standard within the Common Core Curriculum.
For first and second grade, this curriculum centers around emotion regulation. The Gottman Institute explains that in early stages of life emotion regulation is “a three-phase process that involves teaching children to identify emotions, helping them identify what triggers those emotions, and teaching them to manage those emotions by themselves”.
How is emotion regulation taught to young students?
I met with a group of first-grade teachers to understand how they currently educate students on the topic of emotion regulation.
The teachers showed me a series of posters, that the state provides, to help teach students such a complex concept. The posters group feelings and coping mechanisms into color groups to make the subject more approachable.
The teachers articulated their struggle that there is a lack of engaging resources to support teaching this subject.
My Design Solution:
An Interactive Storybook
After learning this pain point from the teachers, I decided that my senior thesis project would be to design an engaging resource to support them as they teach emotion regulation.
I conceptualized an interactive storybook that would teach children to identify their feelings through the storyline, while also guiding them through healthy coping exercises using animations in augmented reality.
The book follows Mel as he faces several big feelings throughout his day. As a chameleon, Mel changes colors as he faces different emotions. These colors reflect the posters already within the classroom, allowing this resource to tie in with the current educational materials.
Co-Design Session:
Determining the Coping Skills
To determine which coping skills to include in the storybook, I needed to understand which mechanisms the students already knew. I decided to conduct a co-design research session with a classroom of first-grade students to learn from the end user.
Knowing the challenge it can be for children to articulate their emotions, I designed an activity for them to illustrate situations that made them feel sad, mad, or excited. They then had to draw what they did to “get back to the green zone” and present their work to the class.
From this session, I learned that young students could easily identify their emotions but had difficulty deciding how to process them healthily. The primary coping mechanism used by the students was distraction, as evidenced by their depictions of toys, games, and cell phones.
Get Back to Green:
A story about BIG feelings
The story follows Mel on the hunt for his favorite treat, a fly pop! Throughout his journey, Mel experiences feelings of sadness, anger, and excitement. He uses three coping mechanisms to manage these emotions: happy thoughts, deep breathing, and exercise.
These coping mechanisms come to life through augmented reality using image triggers and animations, developed in Mattercraft. Using a phone or tablet, readers can access a webAR experience that overlays animations of the coping exercises onto their storybook. This allows young students to practice alongside Mel, ultimately providing them with a toolkit of healthy exercises to regulate their own emotions.
Usability Testing with Teachers
After completing the design and development, I invited a small group of elementary school teachers to interact with the book and provide feedback. While they were excited about having this resource in their classrooms, they pointed out one significant challenge: the AR features in the book would be difficult to display to an entire class at once.
To solve this pain point, I coded a digital version of the storybook in p5.js meant to be displayed over a SMARTboard. This would allow the teachers to read and practice the coping mechanisms with and entire classroom of students.
Usability Testing with Students
I joined the same class of students from the co-design session to conduct a final round of usability testing. I found that using the AR features was intuitive for the children, as most of them had experience interacting with Snapchat filters.
The digital version of the book was a success, allowing all of the students to practice the coping exercises together. Many of them were eager to share their happy places and favorite toys. They were engaged throughout the entire story and were all more than willing to participate.
