Feelings Made Fun: Teaching Emotions Through Gamified Flashcards with Emoji Match

Introduction

During the early stages of our childhood it was often hard for us to determine what our actions would do to others and their emotions, for parents this proves to be a challenging endeavor to teach children what emotions are and to treat others and themselves when they are feeling these emotions. How do you teach a child what “anxious” feels like? Or help them recognize when someone is “excited”? For many children, especially those with developmental differences, learning to identify and express emotions is a challenge. But what if we could make it fun?

Working with Anvaya Feats has helped me see the power of gamification and how we can use it to make education more engaging and effective. Because of this we created the game called Emoji Match, this game uses interactive flash cards with scenarios in a matching game to teach kids how to recognize, understand and label emotions in a fun, playful and interactive environment for the children.

The Emotional Education Gap

Emotional literacy is the ability to identify and express feelings from yourself and the others around you. This is a critical skill used in everyday life by everyone and is also important during children’s early development. Despite it being so important, it’s often under-taught in classrooms and overlooked at homes. Because of this, a gap is formed depending on how well the kid is taught. This gap can affect everything from a child’s mental health to their social interactions and academic performance. This may also lead on into their adult life affecting their integration into society making it hard for them to live a normal life.

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), students with strong social-emotional skills are more likely to succeed in school and life. But children with autism, ADHD, or anxiety may struggle to understand facial expressions or articulate how they feel. To reduce the gap between them lessons are made to help them learn how to understand and interpret emotions expressed by themselves and others around them. Traditional tools like flashcards help, but they can feel static and disconnected from the real world as they lack the real world scenarios that would explain in detail what the emotion they are feeling came from, what causes them and how to properly react when they or others feel that emotion. And so  we asked ourselves What if we could make that learning dynamic, intuitive and fun?

What Anvaya Feats is Doing: Gamifying Emotional Growth

Emoji Match was designed as more than just a matching game. It’s a play-based learning tool that features:

• Emotion Flashcards: Kids match emoji faces with spoken emotion labels like "happy," "nervous," or "angry."

• Audio Feedback: Each correct match is celebrated with positive reinforcement, and every emotion is read aloud.

• Bright Visuals: High-contrast colors and expressive icons engage children’s attention and support visual learning.

• Inclusive Design: The game is screen-reader compatible and adjustable for different learning needs.

Our goal was to make it easier for all kids regardless of their ability to build emotional vocabulary and empathy through play.

Future Plans

We plan on deploying emoji match to several different schools as a way of helping reduce the gap that may exist between the different students. With the game we also want to introduce kids to the Anvaya Feats story which will teach them many things from inclusivity, acceptance and diversity at an early age.

Challenges Faced

During the development of the game we faced some creative challenges which helped us grow as a team, the main challenge we faced was the integration of an amazing story Anvaya Feats into this game, the story had so much to offer that one game could not cover it. With the help of every together we manage to make a game that could help kids understand the characters better while still doing its job.

Conclusion

Emotional intelligence doesn’t start with lectures, it starts with connection. By gamifying learning, we can give kids the tools to understand themselves and others in a way that feels natural and enjoyable. At Anvaya Feats, we’re proud to be part of a movement that blends technology, empathy, and play to empower the next generation.