In early 2015 we were asked by a local charity called the Solas Project to mentor a class of 5th class students from St. Audoen’s school in the Liberties. Little did we know, that a few months later, we would be on stage with those kids at Web Summit 2015 unveiling a wearable technology product that is potential solution to the worldwide problem of bullying.
The BullyBug is a wristband fitted with an iBeacon, which when pressed, sends a message via Bluetooth to an app on a teacher’s phone, alerting them to the instance of bullying.
It was an idea born out of a Dragon’s Den style initiative designed to teach kids the basics of business and to show them the range of career opportunities that are out there. We set the kids a brief, to come up with ‘an idea that tackles a problem they experience on a daily basis’. Out of that 5-week process, BullyBug was conceived.
Our team at Boys and Girls (with the help of 8Bytes app developers), worked with the kids to develop a working prototype of the product, which will be unveiled tonight in front of 4,000 people on the Centre Stage at Web Summit 2015.
We’ve been on a fantastic journey with these kids but we don’t want it to end here. Our hope is to kick on from here and run a pilot scheme to properly test the idea before rolling it out in schools across the country.
To find out more about the project visit www.bullybug.org
