JoyGames

Inspiration

Taking care of mental health has been overlooked for so long. Even though we’ve come a long way regarding the de-stigmatization of therapy, it still seems as if reaching out and asking for professional help is the last option for millions of people. Many teenagers look to gaming to help them distract themselves from any worries. It’s easy to distance yourself from others and become lonely. A recent Microsoft study within the Xbox Research Accessibility Community Feedback Program, a group made up of players with disabilities, looked at gaming and mental health during the pandemic. The study found that 84% of respondents agreed gaming has positively impacted their mental health over the past year, while 71% said gaming helped them feel less isolated. Thus, we created JoyGames to help bring people together through gaming, all while taking care of your mental health.

What it does

It helps bring a community together and meet new people in person to play with during this time in a pandemic but also focuses on mental health issues. Users can play games, such as a two-player Tic Tac Toe and be given questions about their mental health, and be given suggestions on how to improve their mental health at the end if needed.

How we built it

Once you load into the MIT app inventor for IOS or Android, you will see a screen telling you to type in a 6 digit code or scan a QR code. This code/QR code will be on the computer with the code. Once you do this you will get into the app. And will be greeted with the home screen. From there you will be able to choose to go into the mental health questions, the single-player game or multiplayer game. If you choose the mental health button, you will be shown 10 questions on mental health 1 and mental health 2. After you have said you feel this way or not with the questions, you will go to mental health 2. There it will tell you if there is a high chance you have a mental illness. To go back to the home screen you press the button that says go to the home screen. Now you can go into the single-player game. There you will play a game by yourself in which you put a number between 1-100 to try to guess the computer’s number. It will tell you if your guesses are too big or small and tell you when you got it right when you guess the number. Then you can go to the home screen, you can go into the multiplayer game section. There you can play tic tac toe with someone beside you. Each of you will take turns playing the regular tic tac toe game. That is how to navigate and use everything in our app!

Challenges we ran into

1. The program that we used, MIT App Inventor, didn’t allow multiple people on the same project. This made it difficult to see everyone’s progress, so we all focused on different things while updating people.
2. We all had different ideas and we all didn’t know what to exactly do since we don't know how to code. So, we decided to pick an easy yet unique idea.
3. Most of us had never done a hackathon before, so we had no idea how to organize and use all the different resources that were given to us. What We Learned: For two of our team members, this was our first hackathon experience. We learned how to manage time, work cooperatively, and work in a short amount of time. We had to learn a completely new program that none of us had ever touched before and we had lots of fun using MIT App Inventor to create an app! ## Accomplishments that we're proud of Creating an app that was made entirely out of blocks.

Ensuring that users are safe and comfortable, keeping their answers private to them.

Learning a new program entirely in 24 hours.

What's next for JoyGames

We would love to actually make our app public! Our original idea was to make a public leaderboard where people can compete with each other in private groups. They can play minigames and track their mental health to earn points to be the winner! We think this would be a great way to motivate people to track their mental health while keeping people together in a community.

Built With

• mit-app-inventor