Meaidaibahun Majaw, a girl from Shillong who built an app to expose bullies in schools, was among 26 bright young minds who presented their innovations to the Silicon Valley team in the United States.
These 26 bright young minds include 22 from India and four from the United States. The panel included industry veterans like Amit Patel, Managing Director of Owl Ventures, Arun Saigal, Co-founder and CEO, Thunkable and Suvir Sujan, Managing Director of Nexus India Capital Advisors.
10-year-old Meaidaibahun was bullied right from nursery in Shillong. It stopped only after the girl had moved to another school after Class 2. This left a deep impression on her.
Last year, when she started learning to code, the first project she took up was building an app to expose bullies in school. She realised that the best way to deal with any bully in school is to report them to someone in authority. But this is stressful, and often there’s no redressal even when you work up the courage to tell somebody about it.
The application allows children to report incidents of bullying and harassment. in a quick and standardised way.
Once logged in, the child can anonymously share details of the incident including the name of the bully and give a detailed explanation of how they were mistreated. This will notify their parents and teachers and encourage them to take necessary disciplinary action to nip the issue in the bud.
Silicon Valley is the epitome of innovation, a personification that nothing is off-limits. WhiteHat Junior crafted the Silicon Valley programme to reinforce this idea with kids to make accessible industry veterans and to help kids understand that nothing is out of bounds if one dares to dream.
The programme entailed getting kids to create an app to solve real-life problems. The kids were shortlisted from the exhaustive list of over 7,000 entries from across the globe.
“The concept of getting these bright kids to interact with thought leaders was to reduce these conditional barriers that we have placed on our kids. When kids are equipped with the right set of tools to learn in environments that don’t restrict their creativity, the results are always astonishing,” said Karan Bajaj, Founder and CEO, WhiteHat Junior.
