SHILLONG: Ten-year-old mobile app developer from Shillong, Mae Mae Meaidaibahun Majaw, who was recently in the news for developing an anti-bullying app, has added another feather in her cap by becoming one of the 26 bright young minds to present their innovations to the Silicon Valley team.
WhiteHat Jr, an EdTech start-up that teaches young kids coding, crafted the Silicon Valley programme to make industry veterans accessible to the kids and help them realise that nothing is out of bounds.
The 26 children, of which 22 are Indians and the rest are from the USA, were shortlisted from an exhaustive list of more than 7,000 entries from across the globe.
The 10-year-old was bullied from Nursery till Class 2. This had left a deep impression on her. In view of these experiences, she took up a project to build an app to expose bullies in school.
She had realised that the best way to deal with a bully in school is to report them to someone in authority, which is stressful, and often there’s no redressal even when you work up the courage to tell somebody about it.
Her app allows children to report incidents of bullying and harassment in a quick and standardised way.
Once logged in, a child can anonymously share details of the incident including the name of the bully and give a detailed explanation as to how they were mistreated. This will notify their parents and teachers, encouraging them to take necessary disciplinary action to nip the issue in the bud.
“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 Jr.
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.
