By Katie Vasquez
With almost everyone owning a cell phone, social media is everywhere and part of a daily routine for many adolescents – including Chaminade High School students on Long Island.
“I just wake up and immediately I go to my phone, just start scrolling, don’t even think about anything,” 9th grader Ty Miranda tells Currents News. “[I] just go straight to my phone.”
Miranda and fellow freshmen at the school decided to see if they could change that routine by creating an app called “Media Mindful.”
“Everyone knows how to use technology mostly now, it’s become part of everyone’s day,” 9th grader Luke Krinsky explains.
Students began the process by conducting a survey of 324 students at the Long Island school.
“It told us that many kids spend, like, shocking amounts of time on social media every day,” student Andrew Runje Dargento says of the survey results.
The results showed that 96% of them use apps for more than an hour every day, and 60% found that to negatively impact their lives.
The app students developed as as response to those results reminds users of screen time usage, offers rewards for cutting down on time, and has an artificial intelligence bot to help with negative feelings.
“The AI recognizes key words from your input and it makes a personalized response to you,” Mateo Solis, a student at the school, explains. “So for example, if I say, ‘Social media has given me anxiety,’ it recognizes the keyword ‘anxiety’ and it makes a response for that word.”
The team presented their idea to the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and career services annual STEM competition and beat out 32 other schools for the top prize which was $1,800. They hope to use part of it to complete their project.
“I would like to finish the app, make it working and available for everybody to help everyone,” Christopher Covelli, a 9th grader, tells Currents News.
The app developers say they have experienced the app’s effects firsthand.
“It’s really just been like eye opening for us because we’ve gotten to solve an issue that we’ve all felt really personally,” says Dargento.
“After cutting down these distractions, I was able to focus my time more on what I really wanted to do. So as a result, my relationships with my family improved. I could get closer to God because now I have all this extra time,” adds Solis.