A Teddy Bear To Help People
by Ieva Tilindyte, European Social Entrepreneurship and Innovative Studies Institute
Empathy and devotion for others‘ well-being say a lot about a person, especially if this person is a child. It is essential to teach children such things as being kind to one another, sharing positive things with people and the world, and taking care of someone who cannot take a proper care of themselves. Luckily, the young generation nowadays shows concern about a lot of social problems — we can learn it from previous stories — but this time a group of boys showed their support to people with vision impairment. So keep reading and find out how to help others in need.
Four boys — Darius, Karolis, Paulius, and Laurynas — of the age of 15–16 accidentally thought about creating something, without even the tiniest idea what could it be. It was very thoughtful of them to look at that part of society which needs a support from all of us — and we are talking about people with disabilities. They are people like the rest of us but sometimes they need a little bit more help. And children with their creative minds are the ones who can find the finest and simplest solution.
Considering that these kids have experience in programming and constructing (they have already participated in various robotics competitions), their abilities to make something more advanced than just a small prototype was undoubtful. An idea to build a device for blind people came up quite naturally after learning that they all wanted to build some mechanism, which would be based on specific sensors. And these sensors appeared to be useful for people with vision impairments.
So, the second an idea was born, boys started to do their job: first of all, they written down all possible functions that this device could have, shared tasks to be done and thought about the design. So they finally came up with a design of a teddy bear which is portable, easy to wear and very light (not to mention its cuteness!) A teddy bear is special for its ability to measure the distance to the subject with ultrasound waves and respond accordingly to this distance. Even more, when it becomes dark, the lights places all over it start blinking in order to make a person more visible in the dark so she/he can feel safer. There is also a function for a teddy bear to start vibrating when there is an obstacle somewhere around a person. As we can see, this teddy provides all functions needed to feel more comfortable and safe.
Even though this social innovation is quite fresh, the boys have already presented it in a hackathon TechHero, where they received a lot of positive feedback and recognition — that day they became the best from all other innovators. And this recognition inspired boys to seek for more: now they are trying to improve their invention and spread the message about their teddy bear by participating in other competitions and hackathons. They all strongly believe that the most important thing is to look at global issues, be humane. You need to learn how to work with a team to share work and achieve significantly better results.
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p.s. Do you know a child from 6 to 16 years who has developed a social innovation using maker facilities? Maybe you are working on a project with kids or you know a committed person in a makerspace? Contact us, if you want to share your own story! →https://www.facebook.com/DOIT.Europe.Net/
“Entrepreneurial skills for young social innovators in an open digital world DOIT Europe” project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement №770063
