The Feel & Play app

An engaging, story-powered way to learn social and emotional skills.

What is Feel & Play?

Feel & Play is a musical app that helps you practice emotional skills. An inspiringly participatory app adventure combines musicality, visuality and playfulness with multi-user collaboration.

Every child has the right to self-expression.

Every child has the right to express and practice emotional skills as themselves, as they are. 

Expression of all emotions is allowed.

Emotions are not classified as good or bad, positive or negative, allowed or forbidden.

Every child is allowed to identify and express all emotions.

Children are encouraged to listen, focus and express themselves creatively.

The app includes three sections, one in each:

  • Story
  • Musical painting
  • Fantasy instrument

 

 

Easy-to-use and child-friendly game-based sections.

Feel & Play is designed for 2-8 year olds, but can easily be adapted for younger and older children. The app works best in small groups with a supervising adult.

The culmination of many years of work by experts brings together emotional learning and music pedagogy.

A team of professionals and researchers from education, music education, psychology and music therapy are responsible for the development of the app. The co-development partners include selected day-care centres and schools in Helsinki, Espoo and Oulu.

The application development has taken into account the learning concept of the national early childhood education plan of the child as an innately curious and active actor who learns, grows and develops through interaction with others. The content of the app covers the areas of the national ECEC curriculum and provides a new digital tool for working with emotional skills.

Art-based emotional learning.

We combine classical music and visual storytelling to strengthen children’s cognitive skills and curiosity.

Developing social and emotional skills has been shown to improve children’s chances of future well-being, school achievement and social capital.

Important cognitive content combined with new technology.

According to the Finnish National Board of Education, the content of cognitive skills should be increased and pedagogically based solutions should be introduced.

Emotional skills are learned from parents, peers and educators. We have developed a pedagogical guide for adults and encourage adults to use the app with their children to articulate emotions and develop social skills.

Emotional competences in digital form.

New content for tablets and multi-touch screens.

The Feel & Play app is designed to promote collaboration and social learning between children.

The app is also ideal for adults and children to use together.

 

 

Feel & Play and Emotional Skills Components

The Feel & Play app is based on the emotional skills domains, where children observe, recognise, express, regulate and understand different emotions in a safe learning environment.

The stories lay the foundation for observing, identifying and understanding emotions. The fantasy instrument is used to practice expressing emotions through music and musical painting through drawing and painting. Music is a wonderful way to dive deeper into the world of music and art! For the educator, the app gives the opportunity to understand the child’s emotions and also serves as a new way of building a connection between child and adult through play.

The emotions presented in the app are based on the more than 100 emotions listed in the Finnish National Board of Education’s publication From Feeling to Feeling, of which the Feel & Play app currently covers around 20 basic emotions. Our idea is to gradually include all of the listed emotions.

Why is Feel & Play important?

There is a growing need for emotional skills in society. 

We encounter social interactions every day, in our everyday lives, at school and at work. Each of us is different, with our own strengths and weaknesses, and emotional skills are an essential part of the well-being of us all. They influence how we perceive things and how we choose to act on our experiences.

Feel & Play app:

  • Feeding creativity
  • Feeds a child’s confidence and self-expression
  • Encourages experimentation with different ways of identifying, naming and expressing emotions
  • Supports children’s socio-emotional growth
  • Provides a new kind of multi-artistic learning environment
  • Activates children’s senses in a multichannel way

 

 

Data-driven educational technology that promotes emotional well-being.

A musical app focused on emotional skills that stimulates children’s creativity through storytelling, classical music and game-based components.

An easy, fun and safe way to practice emotional skills.

Feel & Play does not require strong language skills. Instead, the app activates your child’s senses through multiple channels including language, visual, auditory and tactile channels.

 

User Score 4,7/5 - Feedback from teachers

“With the help of the application, teachers noticed new strengths in the children – the joy of success and empathy were strongly present.” 

“In music painting, different music samples motivated students to listen, and encouraged everyone to participate in drawing and even dancing and performing.” 

“The app was incredibly helpful in helping children with special needs focus and process their emotions in new ways!” 

Would you like to hear more?

Our mission is to help bring up the next generation of creative, emotionally intelligent humans.