Project Spotlight #1: Distress Center Calgary
A gamified, interactive web application to promote mental health awareness among students.
We are excited to introduce to you the first article of our Project Spotlight series this term!
The Distress Centre Calgary (DCC) is an organization dedicated towards providing crisis support for Calgary and southern Alberta residents. DCC provides various programs to reach all population segments who are in need of help, including a 24 hour crisis line and counselling. The organization has also provided several services for teenagers given the increasing prevalence of mental health issues among this population demographic.
In pre-COVID times, DCC used in-person presentations to share their resources with students but the pandemic has impacted the way they can communicate with this population.
That’s where we come in.
For the upcoming school year, the Distress Centre will be working with UW Blueprint to provide an interactive 3D escape room solution to educate students in Calgary and across southern Alberta about mental health, crisis management and Distress Centre resources.
The Problem
The Distress Center Calgary needs a more interactive and engaging solution to raising awareness and education around mental health issues within the younger population. Although this is a problem that has been expedited by the cancellation of in-person presentations due to coronavirus, the DCC is looking for a solution that can be used during post-COVID times as well.
The Solution
Blueprint will be providing DCC with a platform to make fully customizable 3D interactive environments. This will allow DCC admins to make custom environments for their changing requirements while allowing users to experience an engaging and informative game.
Over Hack the North 2020++, a subset of the development team on Blueprint created a prototype of this solution called Corona Escape. Corona Escape is a fun, interactive, 3D virtual escape room which prototyped the technology that will be used for the DCC solution and provided the team some insights into the user experience and gamification aspect of the solution we are building. The Corona Escape hackathon project ended up as one of the winners at Hack the North 2020++, validating that the problem being addressed is interesting, technically challenging, and has a use case in today’s world.
The Team
The team for the Winter 2021 term consists of a project lead, a product manager, two designers, and four project developers. We have asked each member of the team to provide a quick introduction to themselves.
Ahmed Hamodi: I am a 4th year Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo and I am the project lead for the project. This is my 7th term with Blueprint and I’m excited to be using my skills to build out this solution for DCC.
Aaron Abraham: I am a 2A Software Engineering student. I joined the Distress Centre team as the product manager and have been leading efforts regarding feature generation, prioritization, user research and project management. I am particularly excited to use my product management skills for a 3D game that will impact thousands of students in Alberta.
Jack Zhang: I’m a 4B student studying Science and Business, Biotech at UW. I’m working as a product designer for DCC because designing in 3D/VR seems really interesting, and I get to help out a nonprofit in need!
Kouthar Waled: I’m a 3A Computer Science and English student, doing product and 3D design on this project! I am working with the DCC because I really wanted to work on a project that contributed to destigmatizing mental health, which is something the DCC does!
Jay Dhulia: I am a Software Engineering student going into my 4th year and am currently a software developer on the team. Having volunteered at the Distress Centre for 5 years, I really enjoyed volunteering there, and thought it would be a great idea to also use my technical skills to help them.
Dhruvin Balar: I am going into my 4th year of Software Engineering and I am a software developer on the project. I find the approach this project takes to address issues related to mental health compelling and that’s the reason I am working on it.
Vivian Liu: I am going into my 2B term of Computer Science this summer, this is my first term on Blueprint and I am a project developer on the Distress Centre team. Mental health amongst youth is a subject I’m passionate about, and so I’m super glad to be working with an amazing team on a project that helps provide a wide variety of distress resources to youth.
Amolik Singh: I am a 4th year Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo and I am a software developer on the team. I believe that this project can address many issues related to mental health and I’m excited to use my skills for it.
Kevin Hu: I’m in 1B Software Engineering, and I’m a developer on the Distress Centre team. The project has some really unique work so far and I always look forward to the meetings! In my spare time, I’m a big music fan. Currently looking for a roommate that plays bass.
What’s Next?
This is the first term of the project, so the initial goal would be to set up a solid backend foundation (schema, tables, create/insert scripts, and defining endpoints) and starting on our A-frame frontend solution. The team is also conducting user interviews, initial design prototyping, and low-fidelity mockups to get some initial feedback on building the solution.
Distress Center Calgary is looking to use this tool for the next calendar year, and thus is looking to use the tool as early as September 2021. To learn more about DCC and the work they do, please see their website https://www.distresscentre.com/.
Curious about our other projects? Read more about our article on Ontario Secondary School Dancefest here: https://medium.com/uw-blueprint/featured-project-ontario-secondary-school-dancefest-c7ec0efdf1e2
