The Project

It could be an interactive and intuitive interface for kids, curated with the help of parents and personnalized trusted contents.

The aim would be to offer the same powerful social functionnalities that we people know to the children with a nice UX to allow exploration, discovery and serendipity based on Parents choices, trusted contents recommandation (movies, cartoons, drawings, photos, videos ?), and little friends interactions (with the same contents chosen by their parents etc.).

Social environments today can be really noisy and dangerous, especially for children (that’s why we protect them by not allowing them on Social Networks). We believe that education to social media interactions is important for kids to prepare them to face all those informations that we are consuming everyday. Learn them intuitively to represent themselves and visually modelize their Social Graph could be a way to start educating them to a world where real and virtual interactions are merging and where finding our way is not an easy road.

The Team

Pierre Bellet

Learning and curating everyday about Technology, Design and Social Medias, I’m currently a Creative Technologist, exploring and thinking about new digital & social experiences.

I prototype and design UI, IxD and UX for users through a Social Design approach. I define myself as a hacker because I love to find the breach in our daily life, break things and cracking them with new ideas in order to improve systems.
I fell into the Graph in 2010 when joining 909c agency, and I’m now floating into nodes and connections, trying to organize theminto better experience for people.[/col2]

Our project has two parts: 1) a tool for enabling or disabling web navigation filters for children automatically, without asking for a password or changing user, by detecting the presence of a Bluetooth or NFC device near the PC.

When Daddy is near the PC (with his smartphone in his pocket) filters are switched off, when he walks away they are turned on immediately. 2) a demo of a simple implementation of a protocol for operating content filters server-side, in addition to existing voluntary content classification systems (like RTA or SafeSurf) which filter whole pages or domains on the client side. The browser adds an additional HTTP header in its request, asking to limit the type of content returned, and the server can tailor its response: Google can force SafeSearch on, Facebook can set proper privacy defaults, they can possibly exclude ads targeted to adults (like gambling), etc..

The main advantage is the possibility to filter single page elements (like some pictures in Google Image Search) rather than the page as a whole. This can help solving the request made by Simona on the EUHackathon suggestion page, by configuring the settings client-side in a single place and letting each content provider decide how to cope with children safety. There are many privacy issues, but this is mainly a demo for starting a discussion.

The Team:

The main goal of the project is to connect fun and education. By building our application we want to improve children knowledge on their safety during exploring the Internet. We are going to achieve it by developing a web-based game which allows the youngest users to find out about basic facts which are necessary to be safe.

The game will be divided into several levels. Each of them will consist of two main parts.

• The first one is rather educational and it provides some useful information about particular topics such as computer protection, sharing personal data, safety during using social networks etc. The goal of this part of the game is to present these knowledge in colorful and attractive way. One of our ideas is to create a virtual friend, which guides child through particular topics and helps with advice when necessary.
• The second part of each level will be an arcade game, which will be using information which were presented during the first part of level. Each challenge will be designed in way which allows to beat records and collect points, which is supposed to motivate children to pay more detailed attention on information presented during level introduction. We can provide few examples to show what we mean by this. One of a very important problems is publishing too much information about ourselves. We want to show a person sitting in front of a computer and typing own sensitive data into a form on a web page. This person might be named as child friend (thanks to Facebook API) to make him more preoccupied about the problem. Action starts in halfway of filling the form by person at risk. We are now small little creature in computer running across whole hardware and software, passing by many obstacles to prevent this dangerous situation. We must make it before submitting the form by our unaware friend. Another example concerns another sort of network problems. Our unaware friend is downloading files from untrusted source. Unfortunately those files contains malware. Now we turns into jetfighter and destroy viruses, worms and trojan horses in order to protect our friend’s computer and data. Besides malware annihilation, we can collect points which will allow us to install anti-virus or firewall on our friend’s computer.

An important aspect of the project is popularizing the application. Because of it we want it to be based on Facebook. It allows to access child’s friends lists and post entries on various pages which will be a big help during advertising the project. Posts can also contain some valuable information about being safe in the Internet. Another important fact is that children tend to play games which a popular among their friends, which should be used during such an educational project.

Links

http://hackengers.herokuapp.com/

The Team

Our team proposes a playful application aimed at increasing children and youth safety on the Web respecting their independence. It consists on two parts: a client part where we provide an extension for browsers to aid children in web browsing, and a server part that helps to incentive some children behavior.
The client allows the child to freely browse through the internet with restriction apart from a time limit. According to the decision of the parents or teachers, the time limit may pass faster or slower depending on the website. Moreover, children can monitor the remaining time limit as well as get statistics about their past behavior, in order to consciously take decisions about their behavior. The look and feel of these suggestions is specially designed for children.
The server provides a dashboard where teachers can specify which sites they incentive or disincentive, but provides no way to interfere with the you’s privacy.
By enforcing rules but mitigating the intrusion of parents and teachers in the child’s life, eyeTime teaches to the children the importance of decisions and at the same time makes them responsible of their own safety when browsing the Internet.

The Team

Diego Saez-Trumper

Diego Saez-Trumper is a PhD Student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. His main research interests are in the field of social media, information diffusion models and multidisciplinary studies. At present, he is visiting  the Computer Laboratory in University of Cambridge working in project about information diffusion in a city context.

In Finland in 2010, 5% of 15-29 year olds are socially excluded from the society and the number is growing.

Currently, the problem is being solved by treating the symptoms, not the causes. Of course, this is very expensive for the society.

School bullying is a major reason behind the problem. School bullying can be divided into physical, verbal, emotional and cyber-bullying. Physical bullying is easily identified, enabling outside intervention. The other forms of bullying are much more sophisticated, and therefor knowing when to interfere is extremely difficult. The earlier bullying is identified, the easier is to intervene. When the intervention is done in the early stage of bullying, the cycle of bullying can be stopped. This reduces social problems for both the bully and bullied. Proposed solution is to provide data about when intervention is needed.

The solution consists of:  gathering first-hand data via mobile questionnaire; analysis of data; informing needed parties (assisting the decision making).

The Team:

Second Friend is a one-click fast track to establish a secure, confidential and anonymous chat channel for children in need to talk to a reliable third party without knowledge of their parents.

It consists of a front-end for the child in form of Chrome browser extension and a cross-platform mobile application and a web-based backend for the support organisation managing and responding to incoming chat requests.

Used Sources or Codes:

Tools: html5, less/CSS, JavaScript

Platforms: Google Chrome, Google App Engine, PubNub, Backbone.js

Links:

https://github.com/SecondFriend/

The Team:

Jan Järfalk

I’m a 27 year old UX loving javascript developer, but I’m not sure what I don’t do anymore. I love every single bit of a web project, even the part where things hit the fan… I like challenges. For better or worse I see to it that I’m a part of every stage from pitch to release. I sometimes use the title ‘Creative Technologist’ to sum up all this fuzziness. I have been working with the web since 2003 and is currently employed at a Swedish web studio named Circuit.

My idea is to make fact-based learning (like geography or history) more fun by transforming it into a trivia game. The hack will use the wikipedia api to parse content and extract relevant information from predefined pages.

There will be three main parts for this hack: The first is going to be the question generation algorithm that will scan wikipedia and will try to create questions automatically by following predefined parsing patterns. The second is going to be the question review where parents/teachers will be able to quickly approve/discard sets of auto-generated questions from the first stage. The third part is going to be the game itself which will take the form of various triva formats like “guess the answer”, “sort x in order of y”, etc.. The game part will also incorporate social aspects where kids can post their trivia score on social networks or group with other friends to play the game.

We expect to distribute the hack as a web app.

The Team:

Gianluca Cancelmi

Gianluca is the founder of bitRibelle, a young start-up established in London in 2009 as a laboratory for creative experimentation and innovation.

Gianluca’s main background is videogames development, having worked for different companies on various games, including hits like Burnout Legends and Street Fighter Alpha.

Driven by years of experience working with handheld game consoles (going all the way back to the Gameboy), Gianluca’s aim is to create quirky interactive products and have fun developing them.

Programming is an important skill for today and learning the basics is vital even for non-computer scientists, as we live in the world surrounded by ICT. There are several tools in this domain, such as Scratch, Microsoft Kodu, Alice etc. For mobile devices the only tool is Android App Inventor – which works only on Android platform.
The Waterbear system (https://github.com/waterbearlang/waterbear ) aims to develop an HTML5 version of the visual programming language used in Scratch. By HTML5 it will be easier to install and use, as most modern browsers, also those in mobile domain, will handle it directly. However, Waterbear does not focus on the modern possibilities for mobile platforms and social interactivity. Our project aims to develop mobile and social plugins into Waterbear. The mobile pluging focuses in the use of sensors on mobile platforms (geolocation, accelometer) in Waterbear programs as an additional method of input and control.
The social plugins focus on allowing simple interactions with the data in online social networking sites, for example collecting status updates and friend information and making those visible for the Waterbear programs. This will extend the current offering in Waterbear that has only been focusing on Twitter.

The Team:

Nyyti Kinnunen

Nyyti Kinnunen is a student of science at the Tampere University of Technology, majoring in science and engineering. Nyyti is a participant of Millenium Youth Camp 2011, 4th place in the annual Smarty science competition by Academy of Finland and 4th place in the annual Finnish programming competitions. Nyyti is estimated to achieve 70 ECT credits on her freshman year at the university.

Project Vision: “Learning is more beautiful: split an image and color your piece to create real artworks. Now, teaming up at school becomes easier and funny!”

The project we want to propose is called “School pARTy”. As suggested by the name, the main goal of this project is to combine learning activities and creativity at school. Basically, the target users of our project are under-12 children and their teachers at school. The typical usage scenario can be rolled out as follows. During art lecture, the teacher wants to illustrate the Coliseum to her class in a special way. Therefore, she decides to use School pARTy. Firstly she launches the app, she finds a suitable picture of the Coliseum and then she splits that picture into sections to be colored by children. Children receive the assigned sections on their devices. At this point, each child can color the part of picture assigned to him, and can follow at the same time the artwork his classmates are developing. When the overall picture is complete, the teacher can share it with children’s parents and can create a printable poster of the picture.

We believe that School pARTy can strongly help in developing the creativity and the artistic side of children, increasing their learning and collaborative attitudes. Moreover, children will be encouraged to relate better with others, letting them to feel as an integral and fundamental part of the final project. Also, School pARTy can be used with any kind of image (for example from Google Images, from the teacher’s library, etc.), we are confident that this aspect of our project will stimulate and make learning “funny” for children. To our knowledge, School pARTy is the only app that focuses on the concept of collaboration in school context, without forgetting educational aspects different from drawing. It provides a new and unique tool to increase knowledge and creativity at the same time.

Used Sources / Codes:

N/A.

Links:

Screenshots of the project can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/PhRmR.png – http://i.imgur.com/vsp4V.jpg – http://i.imgur.com/iEnXT.jpg – http://i.imgur.com/eRDtG.jpg – http://i.imgur.com/tgga5.png

The Team:

Giampiero Di Paolo

Giampiero Di Paolo is a third year student of Computer Science at University of L’Aquila. He followed the course of “Mobile Applications Development”. His first work experience (a
traineeship) was the project “Noi, L’Aquila”, made in collaboration among Google, the City of L’Aquila, University of L’Aquila and the architect Barnaby Gunning. He has found ways to
combine studies with his hobbies and he enjoys spending his free time creating applications, especially web ones and for mobile devices. He loves writing organized, performant and reusable code. He is obsessive about design of perfect interfaces and he can spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect style and positioning for each element.

We want to build a web-based augmented reality experience combining interactivity and creativity allowing children to play with a giant virtual piano. For more details we’ve put together a blueprint at http://typefolly.com/hack4kids/. We were inspired by our childhood favorite movie — Big, with Tom Hanks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETT3UHEEc1A. We believe that with the new emerging Open Web technologies available to everyone we can bring more to children worldwide.

Used Codes / Sources:

https://github.com/mirceapiturca/OpenDepth

The Team:

Narcis-Iulian Paun

— ” Experienced web developer, web programmer, freelancer too.”

Narcis-Iulian Paun is currently self-employed. In the past he worked as web developer and programmer analyst in various companies as: Werbeagentur Medien-Jäger, Innsbruck, Austria; S.C. OMNIDATA S.R.L., Craiova, Romania and University of Craiova, Computer Department, where he also served as Associate teacher for University of Craiova and ECDL examiner. From 2004 he also worked as a consultant recognized by “The Craiova Chamber of Commerce” for various web projects.

Education:

• Postgraduate Studies: IT Management, University of Craiova
• Scholarship: E-Commerce & Web Development, Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck
• Bachelor in IT applied in Economics, University of Craiova