Calling all girly-girl pre-teens who love science and technology: There is a new Kickstarter project that will appease both those inclinations.
The cool Kickstarter is called Jewelbots. Sarah Chipps, Jewelbots co-founder, created the programmable friendship bracelet to get pre-teen girls excited about coding and help them learn how to code. It looks like a lot of other people are pretty excited about Chipps’ product because the project made more than $30,000 (more than its crowdfunding goal) in the first 19 hours it was on Kickstarter.
Chipps knows that young girls will be into the coding creation because she and others involved with the project talked to 200 girls about their interests (the girls were between the ages of 9 and 14). Chipps found out that “friendship is huge to them — they’re coming into their own and deciding who their tribe is.”
The bracelets have a simple design: they have four LED lights and a button. The bracelets work with Jewelbots’ iOS or Android app. Each bracelet holds a charge for three days.
Here’s a bit about how the bracelet works:
“Girls can add their friends to different friend groups designated by color, and the bracelet will light up with that color when their friends are nearby. They can also send “secret messages” in the form of vibration sequences,” reports TechCrunch.
“The bracelets are completely functional out of the box, but the idea is that girls will want to personalize them by using the Arduino IDE to program specific commands — like when I get a Facebook message from the boy I like, buzz once and flash blue, but when Mom texts, buzz three times and flash red.”
The one big problem about these bracelets is pretty obvious: young girls will be girls, and at some point, someone is going to make a “slut” group to outcast one of their used-to-be friends. Chipps is aware of this and knows that making online communities bully-free won’t be easy. But she still has high hopes that the bracelet will have a mostly positive impact on girls.
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Image of Jewelbots from Facebook