Inspiration...
We came up with this idea because we witnessed students around us often feeling stressed and not willing to share their insecurities with anyone.
According to a survey conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, about 500 secondary students had thoughts about self-harm.
According to the Hong Kong Free Press, Hong Kong primary and secondary schools reported that in the year 2023, about 30 students in Hong Kong suffered from depression and attempted to commit suicide. In fact, in the past ten years, the number of students that have attempted to commit suicide have more than doubled.
What social problems do we aim to solve?
From our research and an empathy interview with a social worker who works in orphanages, we learnt that teenagers need a comfort zone to just express and release their feelings. However, controlling their feelings and learning how to identify triggers for specific emotions is very hard for children, especially teenagers. The main reason for this is because they have negative thoughts, making themselves stressed. So, our aim is to help these young children and teenagers who have yet to find a method to help them address these issues that they are experiencing.
How do we start from 0 to 1?
Most people who do not suffer from depression have found ways to relieve themselves from stress such as by exercising, listening to music, reading, and hanging out with their friends and family.
So, how can we help those who do not have the choice or support to do such things? We hope to create an app to help these teenagers to find ways to deal with their negative feelings and thoughts.
Challenges...
We originally wanted to make a physical journal but we came across a few problems:
- A physical journal would waste a lot of paper, which is not environmentally friendly and
- The fragile paper and binding may fall apart easily
- Some unique features that we would like to include would not be possible if we used a physical journal.
- Most teenagers nowadays usually use their phones more than a physical book or paper.
So, we believe an app would be more appropriate and easily accessible.
The resources we need...
Some of our members have basic coding skills but we still need guidance on coding our app so we hope that professional coders will be able to give up some of their time to teach us how to create our app.
If our app works, we might be able to stop teenagers from thinking about self-harm.
Who are we?
We are the Moodcrafters, the creators of a mood journal app from DGJS.
- 5A - Charis Howe, Gwyneth Li, Kyra Tsang, Daisy Yuen
- 5B - Eugene Chan, Tara Ho, Sophia Li, Cielle Wong
- 5C - Kimi Fu
- 5D - Katrina Chau
