Give Me That ENERGY !!

The Project

Our aim was to create a digital form of our school’s wellbeing program and this app can become a reliable resource for anyone that may wish to use it. It will give the user the ability to have our ENERGY program on hand at any time and provide resources to “pave a pathway to positive wellbeing.” We focused our project on the junior side of the school as they are adapting to change in their environment coming from primary school and may need the extra support. For their first three years they use the ENERGY program and become familiar with each aspect of it. They are then given an opportunity to share those skills as they advance to senior cycle where they are faced with the option of becoming an ENERGY leader. There are 14 ENERGY leaders which offer peer-based support to junior students. We have adapted the program to suit the current needs of our target market and have added extra features such as links to our school’s student support team(members of staff), information on each aspect(benefits, tips/tricks etc.), a COVID resource page and links to external supports (Jigsaw, BelonG To etc.) We want to reduce stress levels in young adolescents whether they're finding it hard to adapt to the change that adolescence brings, or just need tips on how to deal with daily tasks/struggles. We hope to empower young people to first believe they can achieve and maintain great wellbeing and secondly, actually achieve it and share those skills with others. Some challenges we faced through the process of developing the app were time management and communication. We focused on one aspect of the development for too long at times which pushed the rest back. This was a huge learning curve for us and we have improved our time management skills greatly since. We now use Gantt charts to keep us on track and it allows us to set our short and long term goals. During the pandemic, we as a team did not struggle to communicate with each other but found it hard to communicate with our target market and focus groups through online platforms as we were so used to regular chats and in-person activities. We overcame this by using google classroom and once guidelines allowed it, we gathered data from smaller focus groups in a safe environment. We would like to have been introduced to the Gantt chart earlier in our development but still feel like this learning curve played a huge part in how we work both individually and as a team. We are also trying to find new ways to adapt the app to the current needs of our market and have an endless wish list of ideas that we would love to have the time to complete. Unfortunately not all of these are possible, but in the few coming months we are hoping to have a finished COVID support page, more resources for each page and have an input from local and more further afield stars that students look up to. We aim to grow a supportive and positive community with ENERGY.

View this project on YouTube