Mood Marbles

Why Mood Marbles?

Tracking the mood of a team helps people identify and address problems early. Mood marbles are a simple tool that help you gauge the mood of a group of people—classmates, family members, volunteer groups, or business teams.

Using a jar and marbles, you can evaluate how your team is feeling, good or bad, each day and over a period of time. Green marbles represent good moods. Red marbles represent bad moods. If there are more red marbles than green ones, that’s a clue that something might be wrong and needs attention.

How do you use it?

1. Set up the jar: Place the digital jar where everyone can see it—projected in a classroom, on a team dashboard, or in a meeting room.
2. One marble per person per day: At the start or end of the day, each person drops a green or red marble into the jar.
3. Watch the pattern: If the number of green marbles drops suddenly, it’s time for a group discussion.
4. Look over time: By plotting green and red marbles over days and weeks, you can see how the group’s mood changes.

Today’s prototype stores mood locally in your browser and resets every 24 hours. Future versions will sync contributions globally so that a single shared jar can be used across classrooms, teams, and organizations.

Use cases and ideas

• Classrooms: Teachers can start each class with a quick mood check, spotting anxiety or burnout before it derails learning.
• Corporate teams: Managers can track team morale across sprints, product launches, or busy seasons and intervene early.
• Remote teams: Distributed teams can use a shared jar as a lightweight emotional pulse alongside stand-ups.
• Families: Parents can use mood marbles at dinner to help kids express how their day went.
• Volunteer groups: Organizers can see when volunteers are getting overwhelmed and adjust workloads.

Future enhancements will include private accounts, team-specific jars, historical charts, and integrations with collaboration tools so organizations can improve morale and management with real, human signals.

Try it with your group

1. Get everyone together: Explain that the goal is not surveillance, but early support and better conversations.
2. Set expectations: One marble per person per day. Honest signals matter more than “looking good.”
3. Review together: If red marbles spike, pause and ask what’s going on and what needs to change.
4. Reset daily: This jar resets every 24 hours so each day is a fresh check-in.