Mindful Colors
Mindful Colors is an educational resource designed specifically to assist kids from 2nd through 5th grades with the aim to promote emotional literacy and regulation in the classroom. Using research on educational models for children, I developed and designed a toolkit containing four color-categorized books to teach the child how to associate feeling words and their own emotions to color and an object. Each word in the book corresponds with a color-coordinated card that provides them with an independent activity, designed to regulate their emotion in whatever state they are in.
Spring ‘20 / Senior Capstone Project
Problem
When embarking on my senior thesis project, I knew I wanted to research children’s emotional literacy and education. In my research, I found that in order for children to learn effectively, their emotions need to be steady. Every child comes from a different home, different background and therefore has a different way of showing up at school. However, with classroom sizes ranging drastically, teachers don’t have the bandwidth to aid every student in individually regulating.
Solution
A tool-kit for classrooms that help the child label their current emotion and regulate that emotion so they are ready to take on the day. This kit includes: one deck of cards and one book per color.
Overview
Inspired by psychologist Marc Brackett’s book, Permission to Feel, I used his RULER outline as a foundation for an educational toolkit for children. RULER is made up of 5 principles of emotion: recognition, understanding, labeling, expression, and regulation. It is important for a child to recognize what they feel, how and why they feel the way they do, and have the ability to label their feeling. The kit encourages children to express how they are feeling and have tools to control emotions with their teachers, peers, and family. In his book, Brackett color categorizes different feeling words on a chart of Energy vs. Pleasantness. Feelings in the red zone represent high energy and low pleasantness, the yellow zone corresponds with high energy and high pleasantness, green is low energy and high pleasantness, and blue is low energy and low pleasantness.
Retrospective
Mindful Colors was my first time creating a holistic product and designing for a specific user persona. Looking back at this project, a major step I missed was testing this toolkit on children. In my process, I had completed a brief concept evaluation by talking to teachers and school counselors, but I never evaluated the concept with the actual users - children. If I were to go back, I would have created a prototype, brought it into a classroom to test it, and then iterated on the product accordingly.
When working on Mindful Colors, I didn’t have the experience under my belt to fully grasp the importance of user testing. However, another reason I failed to get the product into the classroom was due to the novel Covid-19 virus that was running rampant and schools were completely shut down.