Jewelbots - Tech Wearables for Teaching Girls to Code

Sara Chipps and Brooke Moreland want to inspire girls to enter STEM fields. They cite a 2012 study from the Girl Scout Institute that found 75% of girls were interested in STEM fields, and that the same girls were often interested in creative fields. Despite this fact girls are not choosing to study computer science and the number of women in computer science studies has dropped steadily since a peak in the 1980s.

Chipps and Moreland are running a Kickstarter campaign for their Jewelbots program. The Jewelbots are friendship bracelets that teach girls how to code and act as wearable tech for teens. Their macro goal is to inspire a deep curiosity and lasting love for computers and programming.

The bracelets work directly out of the box and are based on an Arduino platform. Several uses are mentioned in the video and the campaign page - from notifications and social media interactions to messaging and weather updates. The Jewelbot app works with Android and iOS. Bracelets act as a mesh network and communicate through Bluetooth.

Sara and Brooke previously ran the Take Your Daughter To Hack event, designed to pair parents and children to create a wearables project. The workshop used Arduino Gemma boards, HTML/CSS and Tumblr. Research on what girls would most like to wear and use started at these workshops.

Jewelbot's app is completely customizable and open source, allowing control of the four LEDs that shine in eight colors and a vibrate function. Friends in the area are displayed on the app and users are encouraged to share their creations and programs on social media.

This project is awesome and looks like a great way to get young girls interested in coding. The crowdfunding campaign has been wildly successful, more than doubling their goal in the first week. New iterations of prototypes are being built in August for September testing, with manufacturing starting in December. Backers are expected to get first shipments in March 2016.