The main objective of our project was to teach students to find some balance between the digital and the physical world in order to prevent and solve mental issues that derive from a lack of such balance. We first wanted to make our students aware of the dangers that spending too much time in front of a screen has and provide them with the necessary tools to cope with these dangers. In addition to this, we also wanted to contribute to an improvement of our students' mental and emotional wellbeing. We know that all studies on happiness emphasize the importance of having healthy human relationships. That is why, a great part of our project had to do with teaching students about face-to-face interaction, which is much more likely to create deep, meaningful realtionships than the ones carried out online. As a side objective (although, initially, we had made it a main objective ) was to make students realize that actively participating in their community would have a great impact on their motivation and sense of meaning in life. We couldn´t work on this objective in a direct way, but indirectly, by participating in this project, we believe this objective has been reach to a certain extent.
Our project was born just right after the pandemic, when we noticed a substantial drop of motivation in our students. More and more students in our school manifested experiencing signs of anxiety, depression and other mental health problems. Many of them come from humble backgrounds or complicated families and the social distancing that the pandemic brought about seems to have had a seriuosly negative effect on them. Moreover, during the lockdown and in the months following it, a great deal of our school interaction shifted towards digital environments. At first sight, this doesn´t seem to be anything other that keeping up with the times we are living in. However, we have noticed that students are becoming more and more involved in these limitless virtual spaces, but they haven´t received proper guidance on how to surf them in a healthy and balanced way. We believe that many of these mental health issues are a consequence of the compulsive use of virtual spaces and of the lack of an active participation in the wider physical world.