Improving Mental Health In British Columbia, Canada
Bear In Mind is a gamified app that helps continuing care workers learn how to manage their mental health.
We created Bear In Mind for SafeCare BC, an industry funded, non-profit association working to ensure injury free, safe working conditions for continuing care workers in BC.
CHALLENGE
SafeCare BC recognizes the importance of psychological health, resilience, and stress management in the continuing sector. As part of their initiative to continuously increase the effectiveness of training, they have the following needs to consider:
- Engagement: The training needs to be delivered in an interactive and modern format.
- Accessibility: Many continuing care workers cannot access in-person training, due to various reasons.
- Relevance: The audience should find the learning personalized and easy to start.
Based on our team’s past experience with developing a gamified staff training module for Vancouver Coastal Health, SafeCare BC found our team to be the right fit and tasked us tackle this challenge.
SOLUTION
After several brainstorming sessions with SafeCare BC, we arrived at the idea of developing the educational mobile game Bear In Mind - a mobile app that teaches mental health techniques to continuing care workers in order to become more resilient during unexpected situations.
How it works
Learners guide their continuing care bear worker to navigate day-to-day challenges at work and in their personal life.
The gameplay is simple and intuitive – learners are presented with various dialogues depicting difficult situations. In each dialogue, learners choose a response to the situation, and the outcome of their choices are played out in the dialogue.
Interactive, Hands-On Learning
As each dialogue is completed, appropriate stress management techniques are showcased to teach the concept. The learner is awarded more points for making better decisions that promote their psychological well-being and resilience.
Key Features
- Scenario based learning game
- Hands-on engagement through choices
- Presentation of stress management techniques
- Customizable bear appearance
- Online leaderboard
PROCESS
Designing a Learning Game
In order to craft a game that produces the intended learning results, we needed to gather detailed research on mental health. We worked closely with SafeCare BC to conduct field research with continuing care workers to gather common stressors and the ways patients cope with them.
On top of that, we interviewed experts in mental health to understand the techniques used to promote resilience and wellness. This information allowed us to design the game with dialogues that are realistic, relatable, and relevant for continuing care workers.
A Bear to Call Your Own
One main charm of Bear in Mind is as the name suggests, the teddy bear mascot. Asides from giving the app a welcoming feel, this helps to make the learning more inviting and personable.
A design decision was made to make the teddy bear customizable with different clothing, allowing users to feel more empathetic with the teddy bear that embodies their choices inside the game.
Gathering Feedback
In order to ensure that our game resonates with our audience, we took a user-centric approach of conducting playtest sessions with continuing care workers. The resulting feedback led to user interface changes that greatly improved the player experience. For example, the original design of the game included tasks inside the game that automatically complete each day. We learned from the feedback that players actually derived more engagement inside the game when they can manually check the tasks off by tapping on the screen.
RESULTS
Raccoopack Media launched Bear In Mind on Google Play and the Apple App Store, with the purpose of helping continuing care workers learn stress management techniques in a fun an interactive way.
From carefully gathering user needs and feedback throughout the design process, the result is a gamified learning app that is intuitive to play and learn, while offering the advantages of convenience and accessibility altogether.
• Learning app widely offered to 28,000+ SafeCare BC members
• Enjoyable educational resource for continuing care workers
• Increased user engagement and knowledge retention
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