Our project offers a new way of building a dialogue between a parent and a child through joint drawing of a story.
The interactive drawing tool and accompanying methodology are designed to help children and parents better understand each other and excitingly spend time together.
This approach is intended for children starting at five years old, with no upper age limit. Joint story creation allows the child to process his/her emotions, learn how to describe his/hr experiences, reflect on it from a distance, relive it, and come to conclusions. It also helps develop emotional intelligence, stress resilience, and overcome psychological traumas. This approach will not only allow adults to play with kids, but also demonstrate a simple way to become a therapist for the child and themselves.
Collaborative drawing of stories using our methodology helps to improve or establish a quality dialogue between parents and children.
Our goal is also to enable people, regardless of a physical distance, to create stories together. Our web platform combines the best methods of therapeutic story creation with a modern interactive tool for drawing memories. Users can access the tool via a web application on any device: a tablet, a phone, or a laptop.
Users get simple tools, the ability to replay the story, and interact with the drawings, as well as a set of scenarios aimed at addressing various psychological issues.
Now, a tablet or a phone can become not a "bone of contention", but a way to establish communication with your child or even reconnect with him/her. And perhaps, in the future, your child would like to share his/her thoughts and emotions with you more often.
Meet Our Drawing and Gamification Tool – the StoryTileCraft App
For two years, we have been working on the features of our application, improving the drawing process. Children and parents participated in developing the interface, offering feedback and suggestions. Our goal was to create a tool that requires minimal training and simple instructions to use. We aimed to make the app intuitive and easy. Scenarios on various topics are simplified for drawing by moderators without psychological education. The app is also adapted for use in psychotherapy sessions with children who have experienced various types of trauma. Our tool has already been applied in working with children affected by the war in Ukraine.
Our interactive application also could be beneficial for art therapists. A therapeutic story is created step by step, following the principle of a virtual chronicle. Structuring one's experience into a story with a beginning and the end fosters critical thinking, the ability to analyze, and abstract thinking. Moving drawing within the space and the ability to resize it helps avoid the risk of developing "tunnel vision".
The app is available for use on a tablet, a phone, or a laptop.
Our app under the hood is a set of several integrated applications: an interactive drawing tool with the ability to replay the drawn story (story animation) and gamifiers to play with the parts (frames) of the story.
This version of the app is free and will remain free in the future. Our web platform contains no ads, pop-ups, or anything that might distract or annoy users during story creation.
The beta version of our web platform, which combines scenarios, the drawing tool, and gamifiers, is available at: https://storytilecraft.netlify.app/ .
The standalone StoryTileCraft drawing app is available through a browser at: https://tilecraft.tiiny.site/ .
Story: Who We Are
We are a small company SIA Mental Health & Gamification located in Riga (Latvia). Natalia, Sergii, and Inna – a team consisting of a CBT* psychotherapist, a programmer, and a manager. We started our StoryTileCraft project in 2022 after completing work on the animation project "War Through the Eyes of Ukrainian Children". At that time, we realized that we could provide parents with a tool that allows them to gently help their children process difficult, ordinary, and joyful life experiences. This tool helps children reach conclusions that foster the development of open communication skills and teach them to cope with challenging situations independently in the future.
* Cognitive behavioural therapy
Goals: Where Will We Direct the Funds Raised?
We launched our campaign on the Hooandja platform to raise additional funds for the implementation of our idea, as well as to give a large number of people the opportunity to try out our drawing tool and psychological method for free. We invite you to be part of the birth of a new product and gain a unique experience.
The funds raised during the campaign will be used to create instructional videos with a total length of 30-40 minutes. The costs of producing the videos will include hiring a professional videographer, renting a studio for filming, and editing. Once completed, the videos will be available for free on our platform.
Our app has already undergone several iterations of user interface improvements, but we aim to make it even better. To achieve this, we need funding to hire UX testing specialists for our main user groups.
- Initial 1080 Euros: We will spend this on creating instructional videos with a total duration of 30-40 minutes, focused on mastering our therapeutic storytelling method and drawing tools. We will also develop accompanying text-based tips, instructions, and methodological materials in an electronic format.
- If we raise additional 1000 Euros: We will create the option to use joint drawing for two people in a remote regime. We will host a space for supporting joint drawing sessions on Google Cloud. Participants will be able to exchange drawings in real time or take turns creating a joint story on their own devices. Part of these funds will be used to cover the hosting costs of our new service.
- If we raise additional 1600 Euros: We will conduct UX testing with the help of a UX designer. This includes 6 hours of direct testing, 20 hours of result analysis, rewards for participants, and implementing design improvements based on the feedback.
Thank you in advance for your support!
We have prepared a set of rewards for all who support us.
If you’d like to participate in UX testing of our drawing tool, email us and we will get in touch: mental.health.gamification@gmail.com.
Links to our pages:
