Ella | Devpost

Working on project together

Inspiration

It can be very embarrassing to talk about "it" with a child... Often, children can come up with so many difficult questions that you may not have enough ways to answer them. The topic of sex in many families is banned. Parents are embarrassed to start a conversation about sex education with their children, and children, in turn, are embarrassed to turn to their parents for advice. Research has shown that in most cases information on the topic of sexuality education for adolescents does not come directly from parents or other qualified sources. As a rule, girls receive such information from their peers and in various dubious media sources. But it is far from always possible to listen to the advice of acquaintances and follow the recommendations given by ordinary people. That is why it is very important to address issues of sex and puberty together with children and adolescents.

Buying a book on sex education, quietly placed in a teenager's room, can be a good way to learn, but let's be honest, few children like to read books and, in fact, no book will properly convey everything that needs to be known. Based on our history of the project, we decided to try to implement our idea with the help of the Technovation competition girls after which we hope for feedback, as this topic is very important not only to us, but also to other girls from our country and from all over the world.

What it does

The Ella application is a help to girls who need proper sexual self�education, expanding their knowledge about themselves, solving problems related to sexual life and preventing the negative consequences of unsuccessful sexual experience. The application is recommended for use by parents of girls and medical professionals, as well as, of course, the girls themselves.

How we built it

The Ella application was written in Visual Studio, in Flutter ( Dart ). We used Firebase / SQLite Database for authentication. Ella 's design was done in Flutter ( Dart ).

Our goal is to help girls learn about their bodies in more detail and clearly, prevent violence, reduce the number of abortions, give the necessary advice on sex education, and also support those who have already experienced violence, pressure, and misunderstanding from their parents.

Our project supports some of the sustainable development goals:

Good health and well-being: 1) Reduce the incidence of STDs 2) Timely knowledge of the symptoms of women's diseases and the prevention of these diseases 3) Relief of the monthly cycle 4) Reducing the number of abortions and post- abortion injuries 5) Reducing the number of cases of early pregnancy 6) Reducing psychological trauma 7) Decrease in cases of domestic violence 8) Decreased incidence of rape
Quality education: 1) Increasing the competence of girls in sexuality education 2) Reducing the risks of receiving incorrect information and the consequences associated with this from unreliable sources
Gender equality: 1) Reducing Domestic Violence 2) Increased self-estee 3) The ability to control gender inequality by the state
Industrialization, innovation and infrastructure: 1) Urbanization: reduction of accidental pregnancies 2) Increasing the level of medical care

Challenges we ran into

While working on our application, we faced a variety of both technical and organizational difficulties. We did not get support nor from government organizations, nor from many potentional users.

Members of our team have their own interests and duties. As some of them study and some work, it was not easy to gather up in order to discuss problems and work together. However, we finally could manage to form a comfortable schedule for everyone and plan the work properly. In addition, as we live in different areas of the country, and some of us even live outside Uzbekistan, so communicating itself was not always simple.

As to technical problems, most of us did not have previous experience of managing projects and actually were not familiar with Flutter framework itself.

We had troubles with implementing some features, namely, web view, authorization and chat via web sockets. The first problem was in finding and using a plugin, which could help us to use web view on all the platforms was a challenge. As a result, we had to find ways to utilize WebView separately for every platform. Moreover, we still have difficulties with adding the web view for Linux. Adding authorization into the app required studying Firebase. To make an anonymous chat, we had to study the setting of a server, as we used web sockets for it.

After overcoming the difficulties, we faced more problems, when it came to implementory stage of the app. Getting the Google, Microsoft and App stores licenses was not sponsored by any government organizations, so we had to buy them ourselves. Some parents themselves were not interested in sex education and even considered it harmful.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our awards and achievements We have done a lot of work, it has helped us form a strong team in the conditions of deadlines of competitions and hackathons, we are proud of our awards and achievements:

We won a trip to the camp according to the program ICT4Girls Digital Camp organized by the Swiss Embassy https://itsm.uz/en/press-releases/view?id=179

We are semi-finalists at Technovation Girls 2022: https://t.me/technovation_uz/2560

We became winners at the local event Technovation Girls Uzbekistan in the category on the topic "Health": https://t.me/technovation_uz/2554

We have created two services at the Tumaris.tech hackathon:

1) Emotional analysis of the text: https://liltr.ee/cercis/ella/emotext

2) Determination of gender by photo: https://liltr.ee/cercis/ella/female

We became semi-finalists in the Paradigma Challenge: https://www.projectparadigm.org/

Now we are updating our application and expanding its functionality.

What's next for Ella

The theme of the app itself, that is sex education for girls, is our marketing. This will help us take our brand to the next level, attract investment and expand our business opportunities. Since ancient times, the culture of many peoples has evolved so that women could not directly declare their sexual desires or other intimate topics. We ourselves are girls and each of us needed the existence of such an application. We believe that the natural interest of the female public in applications of this kind will reduce the cost of advertising the application.