The Mindlings
The Mindlings is a collaborative board game for introducing children from 7-9 years old to coping methods for stress management.
Child Culture Design is about understanding children’s perspectives and giving them their voice and importance. It also rethinks our world to make it more accessible for everyone. For this reason, my project aims to build awareness about existing coping methods that can be inaccessible, especially to children. Talking about stress in and with children is not that common, and some might even believe it is something that only adults experience. So, when children encounter a stressful situation, they might not necessarily have tools that could help them cope.
The Mindlings game works with storytelling, mindfulness, self-esteem, empathy, and stress relief exercises to build up a toolkit that children can use in their lives. It intends to be played in a family setting, encouraging teamwork, interactions, sharing, and communication.
With this project, I aimed to design a platform to raise awareness about stress, as it is a problem that affects us all, and it is considered a public health issue, even in children.
Collaborative games ended up being a fantastic tool to give families a space to share and learn together. The game was tested with two families who perceived it as an attractive and fun game that enabled conversations, sharing moments, and fun interactions. Most importantly, it created space to talk about topics that are generally not touched upon, such as emotions, fears, crazy ideas, and stressful moments.
