As technology becomes more prevalent in our daily lives, so does the opportunity for children and teens to experience bullying through texts, emails, and social media. In the United States alone, 59% of all teens have reported been bullied or harassed online. Our client is Eyüp Sabır Erbiçer, a PhD student at Hacettepe University and a visiting scholar at UNC in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. His research largely focuses on cyberbullying among adolescents in Turkey and the relationship between coping strategies and cyberbullying perpetration behaviors.
The client currently has a Turkish application in development which is meant to increase adolescents’ awareness and prevention skills to cope with cyberbullying perpetration behaviors. They reached out to us to make an English version of the application to put in American app stores.
The mobile application, Cyberland, aims to teach high school students about cyberbullying behaviors through the gamification of learning modules. Within the app, students are responsible for the maintaining the safety of Cyberland City, which is vulnerable to cyberbullying attacks. Students are motivated to complete different modules/tasks associated with cyberbullying identification and prevention in order to protect Cyberland City against these bullying behaviors. As students move through different modules and tasks, they are exposed to videos, articles, or mini games that will have to be completed in order to unlock new tasks and increase safety in their city. Additionally, students have an avatar that they can customize as they move along their learning modules to encourage them to learn more about cyberbullying behaviors.
The application will open to a page with seven icons, each describing different ‘missions’ the user must go through to complete their learning and protect Cyberland. Users can navigate to Cyberland by clicking on one of the seven icons and then watch their city grow and protect itself against cyberbullying behaviors. Our team will be using the Godot game engine for development, which allows us to create a 2D, cross-platform game1.
- There was a requirement change in mid October that caused us to switch from our initial web development framework to a game engine. This impacted some development goals as we had to pivot mid-semester. ↩︎