Project Description and Project Ideas

Project Description

• In 2010, Microsoft Corporation conducted a series of surveys to study security issues surrounding social networks. According to one survey, 38% of kids under the age of 13 have a social networking profile, and of those 84 percent have accounts with minimum age requirements of 13. It is clear that children are engaging in social networking activities at an early age.

• In another 2010 survey, Microsoft found that 2 in 5 parents said their child has been involved in a cyberbullying incident. Also in that survey, Microsoft reported that educators now consider cyberbullying (76 percent) as big an issue as smoking (75 percent) and drugs (75 percent).

• Just as we teach children to share crayons and perform long division, we need to teach our youth how to be appropriate digital citizens: respectful and respectable members of the digital world.

•   We propose a private, school-based social network that allows children,  particularly middle school students in grades 6-8, to learn digital citizenship in a safe, monitored environment. Our social network would allow students, parents, and teachers to communicate through e-mail messaging, "wall" posts, "status" updates, blogs, and possibly live chatting (with correct spelling enforced). To encourage students to use the network, as well as to enrich the educational value of the activity, we will integrate several "apps". Example apps include a grade book (with attendance tracking), a simple word processor, a simple presentation creator, a digital storybook maker, a timeline-making utility, a multi-user collaborative sketch board, and any number of educational games. The interface and interaction must be child-, parent- and teacher-friendly.

 Project Ideas

• Monitoring system - Analyze the sentiment of messages, posts, and status updates to detect bullying activity. We hope to provide a safe and non-intrusive way to inform school administrators, teachers, and parents about bullying activity so that it can be minimized.
• Gradebook and Attendance module - We need a kid-friendly curriculum management system that allows teachers to integrate classroom learning into the social network.
• Kid-Friendly artifact creator - Allow students to create learning artifacts such as interactive timelines, presentations, storybooks, collaborative sketch boards, etc.
• Global calendar system - allow teachers, administrators, coaches, clubs, and organizations to keep event information on the site. All relevant events should be visible to each user. Students will be notified of upcoming events such as homework or public speaker events so that they can stay informed and aware of deadlines and activities.
• "ThemePark" - allow kids to customize the theme of their page within given constraints. The goal is to provide a space for student expression while maintaining a clean design. Essentially we want a balance between the expressiveness of MySpace with the uniformity of Google+.
• Educational game portal - design a game portal that allows 3rd party publishers of educational games to submit their unity games to the website. These games can interface with the kidgab database to allow students to submit their scores and achievements to the network allowing them to display their learning progress.
• Permissions and security definitions - Define exact permissions for each role. For example, parents can only see their own child's pages, no other child.
• Design a pilot study - prepare the system for a pilot test in the school.