Emotion Athletes

The problem is the increase of mental health problems among children, such as anxiety and depression, worsened by the pandemic. A risk factor is low emotional awareness, which has 50% correlation with mental health.

Our solution is a fun children's video series for children aged 5-10 to watch with caring adults. The stories summarize the science of emotions into 40 videos, 5-10 minutes each, for viewing once or twice a week over the school year. Teachers need no previous training or reading, just to press "play" on the videos and talk to children.

Emotions are common to all countries, so we can adapt our stories to be culturally relevant. Internal assessments show that our program works scalably and effectively: students become braver, kinder, calmer, more aware, more confident, less aggressive. We also expect results similar to the 11 percentile point improvement in school grades for the average SEL program.

The problem is that most children do not learn to recognize and use their emotions. The day-to-day manifestation of this problem is that children struggling with their emotions or with trauma may have unproductive behavior (shouting, hitting, throwing). The proportion of children between 6 and 17 with anxiety or depression has increased 50% between 2007 and 2012 (from 5.4% to 8.4%, CDC). With the pandemic and school closures, children are especially at risk: previous pandemic studies indicate that "30% of children met the clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder" (The Guardian). In OECD countries, this proportion represents around 29 million children at risk for PTSD, although all 96 million of 5-10 year olds in the OECD could potentially benefit from a healthier relationship to their feelings.

It is a fun children's series for K-5 classrooms. It develops social and emotional skills cheaply and effectively over 40 sessions. Teachers can implement it with no reading or training and watch them once or twice a week over a school year (6-10 months). The main component of each session is a short video story (5-10 minutes) based on a lesson from the science of emotions, translated that lesson into a concrete story in children's language, and with a song. For example, for episode 11:

• lesson: all feelings belong to four basic emotions (anger, fear, sadness, and joy);
• story: one puppet has a disorganized house, another helps tidy up and mentions it's easier to play when objects are in their proper place;
• translation: likewise, we can organize feelings into four basic emotions.

Teachers and parents report that they too learn about their emotions and develop emotional intelligence. Doctors and psychologists prescribe our videos to their adult patients with anxiety and depression.

The videos also depict common episodes of children's lives, such as conflict and bullying, and model positive alternative behaviors, such as kindness and courage.

After just 6 episodes, students' aggressiveness decreases and their emotional well-being, empathy and self-confidence increase.

We serve all children aged between 5 and 10, mainly through their schools, parents, and care homes. We currently have 8 thousand children in Portugal enrolled, of whom 4 thousand were active in the last month. Since all children have similar emotions independently of gender, culture, and color of skin, and since all children love cartoons, we vow to serve every child in the world.

Children are currently underserved because most audiovisual content suggests that they should disregard emotions, such as "boys don't cry" or "no reason to feel scared." They feel an immediate identification with our puppets, who tell them that all the things they feel inside are good, real, valid and important. Teachers whom we survey over the phone say that no other solution on the market teaches emotional intelligence in a fun way.

With more emotional intelligence, children become kinder and have more empathy towards their peers, which reduces aggressiveness, conflict, and possibly bullying. The classroom environment improves, children can express their true selves and feel like they belong, and they learn better.

We understand children's needs by talking on the phone with around five users each week and visiting schools once a month. We improve the product from their feedback. For example, in August 2020 one mother suggested that the videos would benefit from more music, so we added a song to all episodes, even the ones we had already produced, and those became children's favorite part.

For the US school year 2021-2022, we want to co-create the series with the target communities. Our small and agile company has developed "just-in-time" video production with high quality at very low cost. We take about 40 person-hours per session, which includes writing the script, testing it with children, composing the lyrics and the melody, recording the audio and the video, editing and publishing, devising facilitation questions and designing the arts and crafts activity. The project lead would move to New York, test the scripts with live theater in local schools, and produce and publish the first 5 sessions. We would then survey schools and adapt based on feedback before producing 5 more episodes. Then we will segment schools into 4 groups, e.g., rural and urban, Black and Hispanic, and make four versions of each next episode to be more culturally relevant for maximum impact. This branching into 4 segments adds 10 person-hours per segment for audio recording and editing, which we'll match by hiring one audio engineer. In one year, by June 2022, we'll have produced a year's worth of SEL content in real-time.

Our solution addresses children's needs by giving them the emotional tools to lead a happier and more fulfilling life. One example is the true story which we published in episode 8 of the series, where the lesson from the science of emotions is that "facts + thoughts = emotions + behaviors".

Once upon a time, there was a 4-year old boy with leukemia. He went every month to the hospital to get a chimiotherapy injection. He felt afraid of needles and used to shout and thrown himself on the floor in the clinic when the time came. Then he saw episode 8, where Bulgy teaches that although we cannot change facts, we can always choose our behavior. At the next appointment, he breathed deeply, said "I can choose", and remained seated without moving during the needle prick. He looked proudly at his mother and asked, "I was brave, wasn't I?" The mother became very emotional and nodded agreement. The nurses said that he looked like a different child. The next month, he also acted bravely.

Re: Problem: Poor mental health impairs children's learning, and most at risk are children from low-income or minority backgrounds. The pandemic exacerbated existing inequities.

Re: Solution: 85% of teachers strongly agree that it improved the well-being of children in their classrooms; 50% strongly agree that children have more empathy and less aggressiveness towards their peers. We have also planned episodes addressing teasing, bullying, and cyberbullying.

Re: Population: When expanding our program to English, we will adapt them to the culture of underserved populations, for example Black and Hispanic, with cultural references, vernacular, and voice actors from those populations.

We have one established product rolled out in four communities in Portugal: public schools (120 teachers), private schools (100 teachers), care homes for children (15), and families (1,000). We already have a partnership with the champion of children's rights in Portugal. We are testing a business model where parents or teachers pay a $10 monthly subscription for content and we waive the cost if users declare on their honor that they cannot afford it.

We perfected "just-in-time" video production, from our experience in agile software development, and can make high-quality videos based on science at very low cost, about  40 person-hours per session. So we can incorporate feedback almost in real time and optimize our content for maximum impact. We focus on educational content first, which allows us to create 80% of the educational value with 10% of the resources. For example, children like answering puppets' questions during the videos, like and sing the songs, and love the live-action footage of puppets going on adventures.

The result is that children feel so identified with the characters that they copy their behaviors in real life. Life truly imitates our art: 88% of children change behavior after 9 videos. For example, in one classroom, children had become impulsive and reactive after lockdown and would start a fight for small reasons. After watching and talking about episode 8, where a puppet asks for help instead of acting out, the teacher noticed that instead of immediately pushing back after they were pushed, children took a moment and talked about the issue.

Our fun online program can educate children and drive social change at scale.

We currently serve 4,000 children (the total number of children who benefitted from our content in the last 30 days). Our growth rate in the last 6 months is 7.5% per week, from 53 children in early December (see graphics at www.emotionathletes.org/impact ). Extrapolating over one year, we expect to serve 170 thousand in 2022. With our fast production process of one new series per year and strong growth, in five years we expect to serve half of the 100 million children aged 5-10 in OECD countries. (The 7.5% growth rate is too large to be realistic over five years.)

Our short-term metric is the number of children using our content in the previous month, which we review each week and publish daily on our website. We implement "user engineering" and A/B testing to make our website more intuitive and easier to use, for example randomly allocating a new visitor to see a different one-line summary or a simpler sign-up form and using statistics to measure the impact on conversion and retention. We also plan to reach more children through partnerships with schools, local authorities, and NGOs, such as the four organizations in Portugal with partnership protocols already signed or under legal review.

One person full-time, one person part-time, and two contractors.

We are uniquely positioned to deliver this solution because of our lived experience. We did not learn about emotions at school, in our families, or in college. The team lead spent years in the wrong career, with three masters, a PhD, and two post-docs, only to realize he was not happy. Joana recognized that low emotional awareness was a factor in her divorce. We had to learn emotional intelligence from scratch in the last five years and are still practicing it.

Then the pandemic hit. We saw the emotional distress in children around us, children with little patience, angry for no apparent reason, sad without knowing why. That was a distress we knew all too well and decided to do something about it. That passion and drive provided the fuel to persevere in the face of adversity and obstacles.

We developed into a "learning organization." Talking about us, our collaborators say, "When they don't know something, they find a book or a website, and simply learn it." 

The team lead has the technical expertise required (BSc in computer science, a post-doc in early childhood education, training in film-making) and the ability to understand and leverage market forces (a PhD in economics, entrepreneurship curricula from YCombinator and Cambridge). Our part-time team member is a medical doctor with expertise in family medicine and positive discipline. Instead of making people want something, we work hard to make something people want, and thus have exponential growth.

We insist on gender parity and inclusion both in the team and in our videos (the main characters are a boy and a girl, one puppet is a bird and looks and talks different).

We follow practices from academic research (the project lead studied the economic impacts of discrimination): for example, we ask job candidates to omit the name on resumes to avoid cultural bias; for voice artists, we do interviews only with audio to avoid a bias of physical appearance.

Inside the team, we privilege sharing emotions and vulnerability, for example: we start and finish each meeting with a round of sharing our feelings in the moment, which creates psychological safety for teamwork and also helps deal with difficulties before they become problems.

We chose important but difficult challenge and our current go-to-market strategy faces three barriers. First, education is a very difficult market because of the inherent externality: children, as beneficiaries, cannot borrow against their future income to finance their education and personal development. Second, emotions are very important and affect every part of our lives, but immaterial and thus discounted and seen as a nuisance. Third, Portugal represents a small market for us to cover our costs and we have spent several months on business development and creative business models instead of producing new content.

And yet, our current results are so strong and unexpected that we have 90% confidence that our method works, and that it works so well that we can charge parents and teachers for it (and give it for free to those who cannot afford it). The question is scale. If we continue with our bootstrapping model, we can make a series in American English in mid- to late 2022, and miss serving children in the US for two years.

With MIT Solve's help, we can accelerate our impact and start in October 2021. That could represent two whole grades, around 8 million children, who would have to struggle with their emotions because we could not scale quickly enough to serve them. Also, 24 million children in K-5 would start working through their emotions two years earlier, which would prevent further trauma.

Our product-market fit would benefit from MIT's experience. We are new to our market, and thus we bring a fresh perspective, but we lack experience and time, and thus we would benefit from learning about other people's mistakes rather than make our own.

Our current growth is 7.5% per week exclusively through word-of-mouth, which is excellent and shows that we are solving an urgent problem. We have taken six months to grow from 53 children to 4,000. If we start in the US with 100 children (which we could get through Portuguese immigrant associations), we would reach 4,000 children in one year and 170 thousand in two years. We believe that with the help and expertise of MIT Solve in public relations and distribution, we could start from hundreds of thousands of children and accelerate our impact of 3 years into one, helping two whole grades in US schools with their emotional well-being for year to come.

Care homes using our product have children who went through traumatic experiences, such as family violence and custody battles. One child, when she started seeing the videos, commented to her carer "It's really good to be a child again." Our product can give refugee children a piece of childhood back while fostering the emotional tools to heal from trauma. We would use the prize to partner with a refugee relief organization, adapt our series to their culture, and run a pilot study of the impact of the solution in refugee camps.

We could turn our puppets into a digital companion, so children always have someone to talk to about their feelings. This would help them explore, understand, and use all of their feelings. AI would be instrumental into children's voice recogniton, natural language processing like a chatbot, and speech synthesis of a neural network trained on the voices from our actors.

We could turn our puppets into a digital companion, so children always have someone to talk to about their feelings. This would help them explore, understand, and use all of their feelings. AI would be instrumental into children's voice recogniton, natural language processing like a chatbot, and speech synthesis of a neural network trained on the voices from our actors.