Creative Active Lives CIC has been funded £15,000 to develop a brand new Minecraft Education Wellbeing World. ‘MindQuest’ will be an interactive digital tool to support the mental health of neurodivergent and traumatised children.
The organisation will build an immersive, calming and sensory Minecraft world where children can take part in in-game interactions to complete wellbeing questionnaires such as the Stirling Children’s Wellbeing Scale and WEBWMS. It will be low-demand, low-stress, and designed to feel safe and playful. The responses will be encrypted and securely sent to a cloud-based server, where community groups, schools and charities can download the data to assess impact and track wellbeing.
The idea formed after the organisation delivered Minecraft Education sessions for children who were home educated, out of school or struggling to attend. When they were asked to report on the sessions’ impact, they knew that traditional questionnaires would be a barrier, so they built a prototype that let the children complete the wellbeing scale inside Minecraft itself. This type of data collection had not been done before, and it worked brilliantly.
Now, thanks to a grant from the WCIT Charity they are developing a finished version that can be shared with any organisation that supports children’s wellbeing and needs to capture the data.
