STTR Phase I: Science, Technology, and Bullying Prevention in an App: Students to School Change

Mobile Cinema Park, Inc., High Point NC

Investigators

Abstract

This STTR Phase I project aims to transform bullying prevention for middle school students through a revolutionary bullying prevention app. Bullying is the most common form of aggression and almost all states are mandating schools provide programming or policies. This project builds on the strong foundation of a one-of-a-kind, scientifically-grounded 90-minute 3D, interactive bullying prevention assembly for middle school students. The assembly is portable, easy to run and scalable, and evaluations demonstrated large immediate positive effects in students' desire to make changes to school climate and in their problem-solving skills, empathy, and confidence in handling bullying. This project addresses the challenge of ensuring that these immediate gains are translated into changes over time through the development of a novel app through community-based participatory research which combines empirically-based strategies with feedback from students, teachers, and administrators. This app will allow students to practice strategies learned from the assembly in a manner consistent with the growing demand for game-based mobile learning. Multiple teams will be hired throughout the US thus generating income for tax revenue and jobs. The high-risk, high reward technological innovation challenge in phase 1 is aimed to develop new technological platforms that will enable each user to build his own set of events from different scenarios, all through simple touch screen capabilities and build an artificial intelligence machine learning system that will understand the student's free language. In order to achieve this goal, the organization will work with a technological consultant and develop the content using scriptwriters, focus groups, and community-based participatory research. This will create the first student-driven, downloadable bullying prevention app for use in concert with a scientifically grounded bullying prevention show. The app will build upon the 90 minute multi-media show for 7th and 8th graders in which there is a powerful 3D narrative, video illustrations for how to deal successfully with bullying situations, and an audience interactive component through handheld voting devices. Together the show and app will positively impact a school's academic and social-emotional climate. In addition, the show and student-motivated app are significantly more feasible than the teacher time- and cost-intensive models of other bullying prevention programs.