Ideas Brainstorm

For this week we have to come up with 5 ideas for an application we could possibly implement for the community we have chosen. The ideas I came up with are as follows:

IDEAS BRAINSTORM


Issue: Loss of childhood and innocence
- aim to give the children back their childhood
- What makes up a childhood? Fun, games, learning, growing, playing, no worries.
- Average age of a street child: 7 years. Average life expectancy: 30 years.
- Collaborative educational games that build up social skills, literacy levels.
- Create an application that the children can play with – something fun, interactive.
- Children also need to feel safe and secure. How can a mobile phone application provide for this?
- Keep in mind adults are the generally the ones that have caused them harm, physical abuse, etc.

1. Support Network
- Kid’s helpline
- Put children in touch with people that can help them such as Caza Alianza
- Big Brother/Big Sister networks?
- Or access to counselling services
- Map to show them locations of shelters
- Caza Alianza’s volunteers have also been attacked for trying to help the children. Is there a way to put them in touch with the street children through wireless technologies.

2. Storybook
- aim to give these children a voice
- to be able to tell their story
- capture the lives of the street children, let them tell their story through videos, pictures, drawings, sound, words
- tell the world their hopes and dreams – possibly be used by charities to aid in obtaining more support

5. Prevention
- bring back the importance of the family unit
- social, medical, legal aid for families
- support network for the single parent families to make a better home for the children to stop them from running away in the first place
- helping single mothers e.t.c cope with supporting a family

3. Access to information
- puberty – no support during this awkard stage, no understanding, sex education
- sex education is important – many of the female children on the street become young mothers due to either prostitution, or sex at an early age, lack of knowledge regarding sexual rights. Their children in turn are at risk of also become children of the street.
- Information regarding drugs – drug addiction esp. solvent abuse is a problem. Give information about the long and short term effects of drug abuse.

4. Lack of proper role models
- street children see adults as abusers. They are usually wary of obtaining help from adults as these are the people that have either abandoned them, or those that wish them harm (street children abusers, police).
- Seek role models in former street children who have sought help from organizations and made a better life for themselves
- Success stories – to allow street children to realise that a better life that on the street is not just a dream.

Education
- learning tools to give children the basics/foundations for education
- majority of street children are illiterate
- in the form of games?