SELCA

Selca promotes healthy, interactive, and culturally responsive social emotional learning for students from low socio-economic backgrounds through personalized games, articles, videos, and activities

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Our Story

Our generation is the largest cohort of young people in history, 1.8 billion adolescents and youth hold the potential to change the course of our world. However, this also comes with an unprecedented number of challenges to health, education, and well-being. It is critical to foster an education system that is able to equip young people with the skills they need to safeguard their future and live a happy and healthy life. Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a process through which essential life-skills and competencies such as social awareness, self-esteem, healthy relationship building skills, self management, and responsible decision making are deployed to individuals to help them succeed not only academically but also in life.

Selca is inspired from our own experiences as students trying to navigate life at this time and age where we are constantly battling with various stressors and barriers to our success such as impostor syndrome, financial insecurity, mental health struggles, climate change, global pandemics and epidemics. Even experiences like gaslighting, ghosting, blue light driven sleep deprivation drastically affect our lives and behaviors as this is the time of significant growth and development inside our brains. Our humanity is at stake as we constantly fight inequalities, tyranny, natural disasters, global health emergencies, and human caused calamities. This leaves children and adolescents more vulnerable than ever!

We designed an app that targets children and adolescents with a special emphasis on those coming from low socio economic background and/or facing adversity. Our app is designed with a prioritized logical hierarchy to minimize downloading of pages and optimizing bandwidth usage so that students living in places with limited internet connectivity can avail the learnings. We also provide a YouTube streaming platform where educators can upload their own unique content which is culturally relevant to the students. Kindness, resilience, and responsibility are the mighty threads that tie the tapestry of global constructive change. At Selca, through digitalised habit building software and a fun game-based approach to learning, we aspire to foster key competencies in students to help manage their emotions, build strong communities, make responsible decisions, and work optimistically towards their future.

Trying to solve such a huge problem in 36 hours has to be one of the hardest things we have ever done. We were very ambitious in our approach and tried to create a very refined version of our comprehensive idea initially but we soon realized the key is to create a customisable version that we can optimize to highlight key SEL competencies and skills. Another barrier was also synchronizing everyone’s work in one standalone app and configuring Flutter and the extensions we needed to create the app as beginners.

We were lucky to find SEL as a shared interest! We tried to address those competencies first that we thought we would benefit the most from and we all realized that we needed solid relationship advice. So, taking our code, step by step, we created our prototype on figma that incorporated multiple ways to gain this skill- such as articles, videos, games, and active recall through assessments. We compiled our curriculum from well-established sources such as the Happiness curriculum provided by the Delhi government and US based non-profit SEL Learning to enable young people to learn more about themselves, their family, friends, peers, communities, and larger ecosystems!

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