Serena's Portfolio

Health Love Story Analysis 2.0.mp4

The purpose of the project was to discover some characteristics of relationships on media that show an unhealthy or healthy relationship. Through my analysis on the song Long Story by Taylor Swift, I was able to be aware of gender stereotypes, consent, and traits of healthy and unhealthy characteristics throughout the lyrics, concluding that the lyrics could influence young listeners to misunderstand what a healthy relationship is and what it should look like.

Through the unit, there were several important ideas that I learned about identity and healthy relationships. For example, I learned that giving consent means to say yes with enthusiasm, when someone is forced to say yes to something or doesn’t say no, that doesn’t mean consent is given. Moreover, media platforms form gender stereotypes to better advertise their products. Instead, we should break these stereotypes like blue for boys and pink for girls. Lastly, another idea that I learned some green flags are that both people give consent to each other, respect each others’ boundaries, and having good communication between each other.

Baseline📝

I think that I will able to use Habitica to achieve my goal on turning in assignments one day before the due date and completing homework the night it was assigned by making a todo list to write down my assignments and the deadline and notifying me a day before it is due to complete it.

3 measurable outcome📊

1. No overdue assignments
2. Turned assignments the day is it assigned
3. Less time on social media causing procrastination

My baseline wellness metrics are to decrease the time spent on social media which have been causing procrastination and to increase sleep hours daily to ensure my mental and physical wellbeing.

Multimedia Analysis and Review📈

Functionality⚙️

Habitica helps me create a todo list of all the homework or projects that are upcoming and notify me when it is one day before the due date which is relevant to my goal of turning in assignments one day before the due date and completing homework the night it was assigned.

The features of my app that I use the most is the todo list that allows me to write down the assignment and add a due date to notify me since it can help with my goal . The feature I use the least is the feature where it lists my bad habits down with a plus and minus sign on its other two sides, however, I don’t really understand the purpose of this function since it doesn’t provide any support in order to allow me to remove this bad habit.

The app’s promises are that it is a habit-building and productivity app that uses retro RPG elements to gamify your tasks and goals. My actual experience on using this app are similar with the promises where the app gamify my tasks and goals by adding a character like a pet that you are completing your tasks to level up. Through this app, it does help me become more productive as it mentioned in the promises, however, i think that the habit-building section wasn’t really clear in the app and that the feature provided for that section didn’t really help with removing a bad habit nor building new positive habits.

Some limitations of the app is that is doesn’t create a calendar that can tell me the due date for everyday allowing me to see a clear overview of my work that are due. Moreover, another limitation is where it doesn’t clearly present the different difficultly levels. During my use of the app, I found out that the users are able to change the difficulty level they indicate for the task they add into their personal todo list. However, this function was further developed to make it presented more clearly, with different difficulty levels, there weren’t any specific signs or signals that indicated it and was really confusing for users.

Usefulness📱

Overall, throughout the use of my app, I was able to submit most work on time and decrease my time on social media due to increased focus while working on homework. My hypothesis was able mostly supported by evidence, since it was only about a two week trail, I am still continuing to use this app and to help me eventually fully reach my goal.

While Habitica helped me stay organized and turn in assignments on time, an unintended consequence was that I became overly focused on checking off tasks just to earn rewards in the app. This sometimes shifted my focus from genuinely engaging with the work to completing it quickly for the sake of progress in the game. Additionally, I occasionally spent extra time customizing my avatar or checking rewards instead of doing the actual homework, which slightly reduced my productivity.

Habitica may work best for students or individuals who enjoy gaming and visual motivation. Its gamified features, like leveling up and earning in-game rewards, appeal to people who are motivated by competition or progress tracking. However, for older adults or people who prefer simplicity, the RPG theme might feel childish or overly complicated, causing ineffectiveness for completing their work.

The app’s use of gamification to strongly encourages continued use, adding elements like earning experience points, leveling up, and collecting rewards. These elements are beneficial because they help users stay motivated and create consistency in habit tracking. However, they can also be somewhat manipulative since they rely on reward-seeking behavior similar to video games, which might cause users to become dependent on external motivation.

Habitica makes money primarily through optional in-app purchases and premium subscriptions that allow users to access additional customization, pets, and cosmetic items. This business model encourages the developers to design the app in a way that keeps users engaged long-term and motivated to buy visual upgrades or premium features.

Habitica has the potential to help users build healthy habits by linking positive actions to rewards and visual progress. However, because it relies heavily on external reinforcement like the points, coins, levels, it can also create dependency where users may feel less motivated to complete tasks without the app’s gamified feedback.

How has learning about brain science impacted your understanding of your own behavior?

By learning about the brain science, it allows me to think before I act since I understand now that because my pre-frontal cortex isn’t as developed, I might make decisions depending on my emotions over thinking. Next time, before I react to something, I would calm my emotions and think about the impact if I did a certain reaction.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about the teenage brain?

Something that was most surprising that I learned about the teen brain is that the teen brain develops from the back to the front which causes the pre-frontal cortex to develop at a later age and the amygdala to me more active during the teenage period.

How might understanding the teen brain improve communication and relationships between teens and adults?

By understanding that the sometimes the amygdala and undeveloped pre-frontal cortex is causing teens to react more emotionally can help parents to better understand that sometimes when their child have strong emotions, it might be because of an strongly active amygdala. Sometime teens act more emotional because of their FFF being triggered when handling stress and this is important to let parents to know in order to understand that teens can get stressed more easily than adults.

Which stress management strategies do you think would be most helpful for you personally? How could you envision incorporating them into your schedule?

I think personally I like to excerise because it can help me release stress and get hyped up. This is also part of my schedule which is to excerise daily in order to help my own well being and at the same time help to release my stress and stress management.