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Startup
Assess Your Emotions with CHECK-IN: A Card Game By Avantika Kampani
In 2020, amidst the obstacle faced in offline schooling during the lockdown, a 14-year-old student hailing from Mumbai, Avantika Kampani, started her own startup business called Day One Learning Solutions in 2020. The 14-year-old entrepreneur launched this organization that focuses on developing and building innovative learning tools for children to expedite their cognitive abilities while promoting and strengthening parent-child bonding. In November 2022, she introduced a unique card game that introduces emotions to kids, with the purpose of revolutionizing a kid’s self-growth and development through fun, interesting, and enjoyable learning experiences.
The girl set off her journey in 2020 with Seekh. The driving force behind Seekh was her observation of children around her, which includes learning flashcards divided into 6 sections that each stimulate holistic growth for children from the ages of 0-4. The flashcards are developed with research on neural connections and brain development through stimuli. Avantika had discussed this idea in her YEA class and thus transformed an idea into a product and this was how Seekh came into existence.
The latest learning tool, which is a card game is developed from personal experience of emotional learning – CHECK IN. It is a card game that enables both kids and adults to speak out about their feelings or emotions and deal with them. The cards are available in English and Marathi. This contributes efforts towards Social Emotional Learning, for children aged 5 years and above. The learning has a three-pronged approach to identifying feelings, being able to name the feeling, and lastly being able to come up with ways to engage and deal with that feeling. With these cards, Avantika envisions ensuring communication, conversation, and self-awareness about one’s feelings are encouraged from a young age thus developing emotional and social skills at an early stage of life.
To give a briefing on how the card game works, CHECK IN introduces kids to emotions based on 8 characters that depict 8 types of feelings/emotions. Those characters include Angry Akhil, Scared Sarika, Tired Tarun, Happy Harshita, Sad Simran, Excited Ester, Frustrated Freddy, and Silly Milly. There are a total of 28 cards of ‘What Makes Me,’ and another 28 cards of ‘What I Can Do.’ ‘What Makes Me’ helps in identifying or evoking a particular emotion whereas ‘What I Can Do’ enables in identifying ways to tackle feelings. If the child answers each of these they score 5 points. Apart from these, there is a third set of cards, ‘Silly Time’ cards that encourages players to let off some energy on silly activities. Each Silly Time card gives a bonus of 10 points to the kid. The Silly Time will reinforce the fact that sometimes the best memories in life are made when people are silly.
The added variation of an emotion set, a What Makes Me and What I Can Do of the same emotion or color gives the player +10 points. The motive of this game is to reach 100 and the number of players can be anywhere around 2-6. There are 76 cards in total which are conceptualized by Avantika Kampani and illustrated by Shawn D’Souza. To enhance the capacity to learn and simultaneously make the children fall in love with learning, Day One Learning Solutions was launched. Now, CHECK IN promotes conversations regarding the topic of emotions and feelings through a fun game that is targeted at ages 4-99. Talking about CHECK IN she says, “It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that makes all the difference. Let’s have meaningful conversations that equip us to be happier and healthier.”
Presently, she is studying at Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai while sharing an interest in the study of mind, feelings, and human reactions, and that has always been the starting point of her explorations. With this in mind, she hopes to introduce several more products that help enhance child and infant development under her company Day One.
