Stay@Home Survival Kit For Families (Stay@HomeSK4F)

*Stay@HomeSK4F* is a controlled repository and an online community created to help families with children spend their forced stay at home in the most serene way possible

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Inspiration (Why and Who)

The project was created during the hackathon EUvsVirus by a team of three. We are three parents with children aged between 2 and 4 who try to reconcile work duties with the family life. When The European Commission lauched a pan-European hackathon in order to develop innovative solutions for coronavirus-related challenges, we were already struggling day by day to find hacks to manage remote working, social distancing, business lockdown and school closure.

In the second week of March, the Italian government ordered the closure of all schools and kindergartens. The following day we started bringing our children to the office. The company transformed a meeting room into a the "Kids Room" where you could work and toke care of your childern at the same time. That sounds great, but working with children was difficult because young children are curious, they want to be involved and continuously require the attention of adults. The children could also play together and the parents helped each other. And at the end of the day we managed to get the work done.

The next week Italian government ordered the business lockdown, we keep working remotly from home with while our children were at home.

When The European Commission lunch a pan-European hackathon in order to develop innovative solutions for coronavirus-related challenges we were already struggling to find hacks every day to manage remote working, social distancing, school lockdown.

Sharing our thought with colleagues, relatives, friends and other groups of parents, we realized that all families with children forced to stay at home are facing similar problems to ours. This situation can be difficult to manage and can create tension and disconfort in both adults and children.

As parents, we wondered what is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and what will be the long-term consequences will be. The amount of articles on the web has convinced us that our concerns are shared by many institutions, associations, newspapers, experts and ordinary people around the world.

As parents, we wondered what is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and what will be the long-term consequences will be. The type and the amount of results on the web for a search like COVID-19 impact on kids has convinced us that our concerns are shared by many institutions, associations, newspapers, experts and ordinary people around the world.

Among all the institutional web pages, for example the one in the "Childrens Rights" section of the Council of Europe website provides a summary of useful elements to deal with the situation.

When young children are forced to stay at home they miss the social relations they usually have. They miss school, kindergarten, classmate, teachers, playground, friends, grandparents, uncles and other people they usually met.

To overcome these shortcomings, parents are required to invent new engaging games and activities every day, while children keep asking to go out and we are all forced to stay at home.

It can be difficult for parents to organize educational activities that can involve children. Everything is even more complicated if parents also have to work from home and therefore have little time to organize activities with their children. Parents are busy with housework or struggle to keep focus on their job tasks surrounded by screaming kids, so children often are parked in front of a smartphone or tv for hours.

To maintain a positive and healthy family atmosphere, children need to play, explore, learn and interact with other people. Parents need help to organize and manage activities with children they were not used to doing before. It would be wonderful if there was a place to find all the tools, courses, books, guides, projects and material already sorted, all of excellent quality and all in one place, in order to save time.

Thanks to the Internet we have found many useful resources, some excellent, others of poor quality. Unfortunately, we have not found a place where the best resources and tools were selected, cataloged and collected all together.

To satisfy this widespread need, we thought of creating the Stay @ Home Kit For Families project

What it does

Stay@HomeSK4F is a controlled repository and an online community created to help families with children spend their forced stay at home in the most serene way possible. The two main functions of the platform are the vetted repository with high quality resources and the tools to allow relationships and social interactions to be maintained even while staying at home

The online platform for the community includes a content management system with feedback, comments, moderation, crowd voting, gamefication, content calatalog, advanced search, communication and communication tools, a marketplace and more.

We are different

We appreciate the tutorials on Pinterest or blogs, but we are not a creativity blog. We integrate video conferencing tools, but we are not Slack or Skype. We use virtual classrooms and distance learning, but we are not Google Classroom or Cousera. We have link to video in our repository, but we are not Prime Video, YouTube and not even Netflix. Our platform has collaboration and sharing tools, but we are not Google G-Suite and not even Facebook.

The purpose of Stay@HomeSK4F is not to sell products or services. We are a community created to help children, families and communities to face the difficulties of an unusual situation and a difficult period in the best possible way.

Noone should be left behind

Studies carried out by the United Nations, the European Commission and other organizers show that the impact of isolation will be more froth on the children and families who are in conditions of discomfort and had already before the pandemic. The most vulnerable people from the social point of view deserve special attention from the community.

The repository

Stay@HomeSK4F helps parents organize educational and engaging activities for their children by providing a rich library of educational paths, guides, games, courses, tutorials, experiments, books, articles and other resources of very high quality. All resources are organized by categories and age groups and tagged with topics for quicker search.

Stay@HomeSK4Fits aggregates original content along with existing resources and tools from many sources with a strong focus on content quality and user security. The users can create original contents and share their experiences and skills. Users will be able to add external already existing high-quality content to the library. The contents of some selected source may be also automatically imported and indexed in massive mode.

Companies, educators, schools and other organizations can contribute to the enrichment of the Stay@HomeSK4F library. Proposals are evaluated by a experts board and channel moderators before being made publicly available.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Our platform make use of artificial intelligence technologies for two purposes:

  1. help moderators to analyze and classify the contents present in the repository
  2. suggest to users contents or tools based on their profile or previous interactions with the platform (for example the history of the contents explored in the repository) To achieve this we plan to use existing AI / ML models that can be used in SaaS mode or those present in open soruce libraries. We planned to do experiments to find the best solution for our needs in the near future.

Marketplace

The authors of the contents are invited to indicate a way to find all the necessary material and can suggest "kits" prepared specifically to facilitate the purchase of the material by the parents. When possible, authors are also invited to suggest how to use recycled and "domestic" materials commonly available at home (eg how to replace a commercial modeling clay with a homemade one with the recipe attached). Manufacturers and retailers can promote products and services useful for carrying out the activities in the library within the Stay@HomeSK4F marketplace. All listings are rated by channel moderators must comply with the platform regulation.

Communication Tools

Stay@HomeSK4F allows to maintain a high level of social interaction through various channels and many multimedia communication tools even without leaving home. Widespread tools product and services are included using plugin and connectors. We have plan to integrate with application for training , virtual classroom, instant messaging , audio and video call, live event, virtual laboratory for collaborative and interactive experiment, multiplayer game environment.

Families, groups of friends, schools, associations and other types of communities can create private groups on Stay@HomeSK4F and use the tools of the platform to continue their activities remotely in the best possible way.

Business Plan

The purpose of Stay@HomeSK4F is not to sell products or services. We are not a business firm, and we will make use of open soource software and free services, but anyway we will needs some found to keep the project going. We think that we keep the cost very low and rely on the following sources to cover the expense:

  • user subscription for access premium content
  • publich founding for no profit organization
  • Volunteering works
  • fee from sellers on the marketplace

What I learned

I learned that some things are obvious to me are not obvious to others and that some things that are difficult for me are easy and natural for others. I learned that by providing skills, ideas and skills you can obtain important benefits for all. I learned to use new productivity and collaboration tools.

What's next

We plan to start building a working online platform from the product concept defined in these days, also integrating other interesting complementary projects that we discovered during the hackathon.

The first steps will be completation of the mockup and the selection of the open source CMS/online community platform among the many available.

Built With

  • app
  • chat
  • video
  • web-api
  • website
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