Teens’ wellness app makes it to US final

FOUR second-year students from St Vincent’s Secondary School in Cork have travelled to San Francisco in the US to represent Europe in the final of the Junior category of Technovation Girls.

Technovation is a global tech education nonprofit that empowers girls to become leaders, creators, and problem-solvers with the support of volunteer mentors and parents.

Alicja Skulimowska, Leona Islam, Roisín Buckley, and Layla O’Driscoll, all aged 14, were selected to represent Europe in the final for the development of a mental health support app for teenagers.

They are one of 15 teams from across the world who have made the final and will be joined in their category by teams representing Kenya, India, Brazil, and the US.

This was the first year that the Technovation programme was run at St Vincent’s Secondary School. It was run by teacher Sinead Connolly, with the support of principal James Deane, deputy principal Rosemary Ferriter, and other staff members.

A total of 53 students were involved in the after-school programme, who Ms Connolly said were “extremely enthusiastic and motivated”.

Alicja, Leona, Roisín, and Layla shared a vision to create a safe space for young people and to offer them support. They went on to create Bongo Buddies, a free and accessible wellness app designed to provide certified mental health support for teenagers.

Alicja explained how they carried out market research as a team to identify what they wanted their app to look like, such as the inclusion of a chatbot, before designing the layout of the app and coding it using Swift, an Apple programming language.

Speaking about the chatbot feature, Layla said: 

“We wanted a way for someone to talk to a person who can give that feedback without worrying about that information being leaked to anyone, so the chatbot was to make the user feel secure and that they can talk to it without it being too personal.”

Touching on the importance of accessibility, Leona said: “We wanted everyone to be able to use our app because a lot of apps focus on adults, and this one type of person, and the world isn’t like that, there are several different types of people.

“We also have the Lir ASD Hub in our school, so we wanted to help them as well. So, to make it accessible, Bongo is under different colour-blind filters so that he is very easily identifiable.

“It’s the reason we made the Bongo mascot purple because it’s a colour almost everyone can see.”

Roisín said they hope to launch the app on their return from the competition and are working on improving some features by adding more content before launching.