Garotas que vão além
Garotas Informadas
Garotas Informadas is a mobile app designed to help young girls navigate the emotional changes of their first menstruation. Unlike complex trackers built for adult women, our app provides a welcoming, age-appropriate safe space. It features a completely offline mood and text diary, ensuring absolute privacy by storing all personal data locally on the device. An embedded video connects users directly with our mission, avoiding external ads or algorithms. By prioritizing strict data security and empathy, we empower teenage girls to understand their feelings with confidence.
Technical Elements
Entrepreneurship
Regional Pitch Events
- Virtual judging teams do not upload presentation slides
Learning Journey
Learning Journey
Our team learned how to think like software engineers. Technically, our biggest challenge was saving multiple data points (date, mood, text) in the diary without creating a messy database. We overcame this by learning to use data lists in MIT App Inventor, packing data with 'make a list' and unpacking it using local variables. Non-technically, we learned the importance of user experience and privacy. We chose an offline TinyDB namespace to guarantee data security, protecting teenagers' sensitive information. Overcoming bugs taught us resilience and that building an app is about solving real-world problems safely.
Information Legitimacy Description
To ensure the legitimacy of our project’s data, we focused on primary research and direct user feedback. We began by documenting the real challenges our own team members faced during menarche. To validate these insights, we conducted informal interviews and surveys with peers in our age group. By cross-referencing these firsthand accounts, we identified a consistent lack of age-appropriate resources. This qualitative approach allowed us to base our project on authentic, lived experiences rather than assumptions, ensuring that our information reflected the genuine needs and concerns of our target audience.
Bibliography
View your bibliographyEthics
When developing 'Garotas Informadas', ethics were our top priority, specifically regarding data privacy and child safety. We recognized that health and emotional data from young teens are highly sensitive. Unlike many commercial trackers that collect and monetize user data, we designed our app to be completely offline. Using MIT App Inventor’s TinyDB with a secure namespace, all diary entries and mood logs are stored strictly locally on the user's device. We do not use cloud servers, ensuring zero risk of data leaks. Additionally, we considered the ethical implications of media consumption. Instead of using external links where girls might encounter inappropriate ads or harmful algorithms, we embedded our video directly into the app. By prioritizing a secure, ad-free, and private environment, we ethically designed a tool that empowers girls without exploiting their vulnerable transitional phase into adolescence.
