AMMAN — It offers a way for children to
express themselves “without saying any word,” 18-year-old founder
Dania Mubaiden
said of her project “Drawit”. Drawit, both a mobile application set to be
launched soon and a book, is aimed at helping children express their feelings
by drawing shapes that identify specific problems, Mubaiden told
Jordan News.اضافة اعلان
The project furthermore hopes to help
parents understand problems their children are experiencing. According to
Mubaiden, it works by giving various different shapes specific meanings and
allowing the children to select which shapes they identify with. This way “when the children decide on the
shapes that express who they are, the parents will understand,” the entrepreneur
explained.
Mubaiden started the
project in 2019 at 14 years old. Since then, both her and her team have been
hard at work developing it.
The entrepreneur said she drew her
inspiration for the application from her own childhood. She explained that when
her mother had cut her hair “very short”, she couldn't express how she felt
about her new hairstyle until a psychiatrist got involved. “There was this
doctor ... that knew (I was upset because) my mom cut my hair in a very short
style, just from my drawing,” Mubaiden said.
This interaction piqued Mubaiden’s
curiosity. “How was this doctor able to understand my mental health, when my
own mother, who was supposed to be one of the closest people to me, couldn't?”
she asked herself. This question sparked the idea for Drawit. “Instead of only
the doctors being able to understand the mental health of children,” she
explained, she wanted Drawit to be able to help parents so that “anyone can
understand their (children’s) mental health.”
However, when the pandemic first struck Jordan
in March 2020, Mubaiden faced major setbacks in developing the application. “Drawit
is based on what we try on the kids,” she explained. The effectiveness of the
process had to be tested. “Are our perspectives right or wrong? We needed to
test our theories,” the entrepreneur said. These questions remained unanswered
as study participants, given the nationwide lockdown, were not readily available.
Since then, Mubaiden and her team have
started rebuilding the project. “We're back, we're attempting new things, but
the experiments have lessened in a drastic way,” she said.
In 2020, Mubaiden’s
brainchild won the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Arab Startup Competition and Zain
Jordan’s "Zain Initiative 4" competition. The entrepreneur explained
that, for her, winning is motivated by two things. The first is the feeling of
accomplishment, the entrepreneur said, adding, “When you win a competition, you
feel like (you’re) doing something that has meaning.” The second is “the money,”
although not specific amounts, she explained. “You need that push until the
people can see you and you build something.”
Mubaiden has also published a Drawit book,
which she describes as a self-expression drawing book. With it, the author
hopes to receive feedback from participants to ensure the accuracy of the
Drawit application.
Although she’s not finishing up with the
project any time soon, Mubaiden said that “it's not the last thing we're
planning on doing. We're trying to build more than one tool.” The first version
of the app may be released as early six months from now.
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