Continuing care workers often face stressful situations.
How do we help them manage stress and promote mental wellness?
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.
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:
After several brainstorming sessions with SafeCare BC, we arrived at the idea of developing the educational mobile game Bear In Mind. This app teaches mental health techniques to continuing care workers in order to become more resilient during unexpected situations.
How to Play
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.
How to Play
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 App Features
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 they 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 personable.
A design decision was made to make the teddy bear customizable with different clothing. This allows the learners feel more empathetic with the teddy bear that embodies their choices inside the game.
Gathering Feedback From the Audience
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 some UI changes which 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.
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.
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