Coping strategies for kids

Child psychology

Last week in class, we heard from two different project in the education arena: a new video system for online lectures, and a research project about disseminating valuable information to schoolchildren in the Chicago area. There are so many details involved in these projects, so I'm glad they took the time to visit our class and hear our thoughts. It's helpful to have an outside perspective when you're designing or researching something brand new.

With that in mind, I've turned to some more outside sources for planning my zoo game. I'm looking for specific ways that kids can reduce their chances of depression, and/or alleviate the depression they are currently experiencing. There's a lot of vague stuff in the literature about "coping strategies," many of which are abstract and cognitive in nature. I'm searching for concrete examples, specific behaviors I can encourage kids to perform.

I was lucky to find several valuable child psychology sources with just this sort of information. I can use some of their recommended activities to build the small exercises within the game. I was especially interested in the concept of play therapy, which seems consistent with the warm, whimsical attitude I want to communicate in my game. The tool kit presented at playtherapy.org is so thought-provoking, because I think an online game could provide kids with many of those useful behaviors, like creative visualization, therapeutic story telling, drama role-play, and art/drawing.

If I can encourage children to play more (especially unstructured, active outdoor play, as emphasized in this article), I think I will be in a good place.

So here's what I found: some specific strategies I'd like to incorporate.

• substituting reasonable thoughts for unreasonable ones (polar bear exercise)
• self-monitoring mood (crocodile exercise)
• increasing positive activities such as unstructured childhood play (monkey activities)
• social skills: initiating conversations, responding, refusing / making requests (turtle game)
• self-control and monitoring (what animal could this be?)
• getting better sleep (koala exercise) as discussed here.

Flash games

Shifting gears a bit: I also checked out some fun Flash games for kids! Casual games are really big right now (I scoped this article for some tips about sustainability for casual games online). Here's a fascinating blog post that breaks down a popular game into all of its usability components, like this:



Pretty overwhelming. To see for myself what these game experiences are like, I tested out Diner Dash by Playfirst...



...and another one of their popular kids' games, Avenue Flo:



Unlike websites, these games don't have consistent navigation throughout. They are fullscreen experiences, with minimal references to previous screens or the outside world. They have their own specialized UI elements, rather than a list of web links. Since I'd prefer to make a web-based game rather than an executable right now, I think I can strike a middle ground between those two extremes.

Now, in terms of feasibility, I don't think I can realistically expect to have a fully functional game for my second digital artifact. So I'll have to scale my project down to its key elements:

1. Opening page with navigation
2. Choose a character
3. Story page (time to cheer up)
4. Zoo map
5. 7 introductions (zoo fades to background)
6. 7 game screenshots
7. About page
8. Extras page
9. Credits page

I can always add some more functionality over the break, or later down the road as I continue to feel inspired about this topic.

Sample art

And now your regularly scheduled update of "stuff I did."




The rest is a surprise ;)