PandHEMOT®: An open science and free psychoeducational app for enhancing children and adolescents’ understanding of pandemics/epidemics, emotions, and emotion regulation

The General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2021) emphasized the urgency of promoting open science practices to address societal challenges, including natural disasters. In this context, scholars have the responsibility to promote people’s well-being by implementing solutions that are freely available to a wide audience. Accordingly, we developed PandHEMOT® (Pandemics – Helmet for EMOTions), a psychoeducational app for children and adolescents. It comprises 10 levels that explain pandemics/epidemics, safety measures, emotions, and emotion regulation, integrating knowledge from medicine, civil protection, and psychology. Its content was developed in dialogue with practitioners and community members (Rocca et al., 2023), reflecting one of UNESCO’s (2021) key pillars for open science, namely open engagement of societal actors. We tested the efficacy of this tool involving 147 third- and seventh-graders from Northern Italy, divided into an experimental group (participating in a three-unit training) and a control group (receiving training after the testing phase). Both groups completed pre- and post-test questionnaires assessing their knowledge. Conducting generalized linear mixed models and linear mixed models, we confirmed the efficacy of the training in increasing children and adolescents’ knowledge about the app contents. In line with another key pillar of open science, namely open scientific knowledge (UNESCO, 2021), the related peer-reviewed journal article was published open access (Raccanello et al., 2024), and PandHEMOT® is freely available for download from the Google Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=appinventor.ai_robert_butter.PandHEMOT).