Poliisiauto (in English Police car) is a mobile application made for reporting bullying incidents, originated from school children´s anti-bullying ideas and developed by multiple groups of students from the University of Oulu.
As a base of this anti-bullying Police car application is a school children's solution ideated in Make-A-Diffence project during 2020-2021. The original idea was a size-changing police car that would capture the bully and comfort the bullied by playing soothing music. The original idea also included an application that could be used to call the police car and track its location.
After the initial project with the class was finished, a group of university students made a video summarizing all the ideas made in the class. Based on the video the class voted this anti-bullying police car idea to be best suited for further development. The same university student group then created a prototype based on this idea. The prototype was an application that allowed students to report bullying incidents by sending a written message to a teacher of their choice either anonymously or non-anonymously.
Based on the prototype another student project group made the initial version of the actual application. Some of the functionalies were changed at this point, including the design of the application compared to the prototype, but the main feature of reporting bullying incidents to teachers was kept the same. The reporting could now be done either as voice message or video with the emergency notification function or as a more formated written report function.
The development of the application was continued by yet another student project group who are responsible for the current version of the application and have for example added an English language option. This student group also held a feedback session with group of school students that were familiar with Make-A-Diffence project.
The application has been implemented following the principles of open-source code. The app includes a separate server and client side, both of which can be found on the INTERACT GitHub:
Note that the current version of the application is not ready for publication.