Jewelbots Is A Friendship Bracelet That Teaches Girls How To Code

Jewelbots, a programmable friendship bracelet that debuted on Kickstarter last week, is on a mission to make coding popular among pre-teen girls.

Jewelbots surpassed its $30,000 crowdfunding goal in the first 19 hours. In the past five days, the campaign has pulled in over $70,000 from nearly 800 backers, and it still has 25 days to go.

“When MySpace was a big thing, knowing HTML and CSS was cool, and now that Minecraft is big, kids want to make awesome models so they’re coding in Java,” says Jewelbots co-founder Sarah Chipps. “We’re trying to reverse engineer that with Jewelbots.”

The relatively simple friendship bracelets are equipped with four LED lights and a button. They pair with the Jewelbots iOS or Android app and are designed to hold a charge for three days.

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.

So if you’re a thirteen-year-old girl sitting in a classroom where you’re not allowed to use your phone, you can send two buzzes to Stacey so she’ll know to meet you in the hallway in the middle of class.

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.

Encouraging pre-teen and teenage girls to publicly color code their friends sounds a bit problematic, and Chipps acknowledges that making any online community bully-free is a challenge.

“We talked to 200 girls between the ages of 9 and 14 about what interests them, and universally what we heard is that friendship is huge to them as they’re coming into their own and deciding who their tribe is,” Chipps says.

The bracelets retail for $65 each and will ship in the Spring of 2016.

In the meantime, Jewelbots will be working on building a mesh network of wearables to boost signal strength without relying on cellphones, as well as developing additional educational wearables for teens.

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog