We need to address the importance of staying safe online and increasing the social resilience of kids that may not understand what staying safe online really means. This is important because the children are coming to the age of owning smartphones, and will be inclined to use social media along with all of their friends. However, social media is actively used in negative ways. In response, this knowledge of online safety will help them be resilient to inappropriate and strange interactions with people online. This will clear up misunderstandings, protect them from negative interactions, and increase their awareness before it occurs. The only partially relevant solutions on the market right now are child protection apps, that restrict you to not be able to download certain apps. This does not protect the child from interactions within the apps themselves through direct messaging. All sorts of bot accounts and online predators use platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. The engineers need to design an informational exhibit to effectively communicate to young children about their social resilience and how to protect themselves online from the negative parts of social media. The solution must be made with less than $100. The exhibit must both interest children as well as educate them on how to make their social media experiences benefit their lives after understanding how to make better choices. As we began to tackle this problem we realized that the best way to teach children about social media resilience and safety would be through an interactive game. After multiple designs and ideas we finally came up with our final design. Our final design consists of a combination of a GUI and four SparkFun buttons. The way it works is that the GUI would present a question on a screen with four possible answer choices. The user would then answer the question using the SparkFun buttons. We believe that our final design is an effective one because it is able to teach about social resilience while still being fun and interactive. Children today are exposed to social media at an earlier age so education on social media safety will allow them to maintain their social resilience, and our exhibit does exactly that.
Using the Arduino package in MATLAB : creating an autonomous interactive game for children as a museum exhibit.