Cambridge Acorn Project update
It has been a quiet month on the project since our last update. Most of the work has been in the background, finalising the content of some online videos and a children and young people’s version of our Tetris protocol. This should now go live on our website this week (w/c 03/10/22).
Alongside this, our website has now been updated and we have a secure area, protected by a password, which is set out based on the (slightly rough!) storyboard I included at the end of my previous blog. The aim is that this will now be a continuously developing area of our website, which children, young people and families can access to show them how to use the Tetris intervention in an accessible way – we hope! Our aim in doing so by providing this is that the Tetris project will be sustainable and will endure beyond the life of this funding regardless of what happens over the next month or so.
Our next step is consulting with children, young people and families about these resources and whether they feel they are helpful and accessible and whether something is missing. In order to achieve this, we have made contact with a local primary and secondary school regarding running some feedback and assessment sessions over the next few weeks and we are also utilising this as an intervention through our drop-ins to see if families will find it helpful. We are aiming to run these sessions through October with a view to reporting on impact in November.
It will be interesting to see whether children, young people and families feel that the tools we have developed will support them in the way we hope or if we need to go further or work differently. Finding an accessible intervention which works beyond the therapy room and across the week which children, young people and families can access at moments of genuine trigger and distress out there ‘in the world’ (a core theme of one of our explanatory videos) remains somewhat of a Holy Grail.
Will Tetris prove able to fill this much needed gap? Only time will tell and, in all honesty, finding answers to this question will take us beyond the next month, however we sincerely hope that the work we do over the next month or so will give us some steer as to whether or not we are on the right path. We are also exploring some alternative options which do not cover the digital space as such but hopefully the work we do over the next month will help to show a synergy between tackling health inequalities and the importance of digital inclusion more broadly.