Kidgab was built by Stephanie Valentine, with assitance from her mentor, Dr. Tracy Hammond. Kidgab is an online social network for children, specifally for the Girl Scouts of Central Texas. Girl scouts and their parents are free to join this website.

Website: http://kidgab.net

My project is to determind how cyberbullying starts and who initiates cyberbullying, as well as who is the victim. Since we (another DREU student and my graduate student mentor) cannot force children to cyberbully each other, our goal has changed to observe how trends are made and circulate within a social networking community. Within my project, I need to gather data in order to make observations.

Over time, my project has slightly changed. I my original goal was to observe trends children made. My goal changed into trying to gain a retention rate for KidGab. When my partner and I first began working on KidGab, there was about one to two girls being slightly "active" on the site. We (my Graduate Mentor, my partner, and I) decided an "active" user was a user who comes onto a site at least once a week. The users we had at our starting point (I am considering the starting point to be the moment I began working on the site) were coming onto KidGab once every two to three weeks. In order to observe trends, we needed different ways to entertain and engage our users in order to gather the data we needed. My project began focusing on personality quizzes and whether or not they were helping to increase retention rates.

Plugin:

Our plugin, called 'Digital Quests', is essentially an experiment we performed, based off of Steven Smith's own experiment. Essentially, we are asking our users to draw an image and seeing if the image has any similarities to images other users drew. We disguised this in the form of fun quests. A user reads a story and decides whether or not they want to draw an image for the story. Our story is that the Administer of KidGab needs the user's help to save a Prince. The user, if they choose to, can then participate in 9 activities, each asking the user to draw an image. The 9 activities are to draw a: Castle, Vehicle, Sidekick, Creature, Battle Outfit, Weapon, Object of Power, Treasure, Celebration

We are using WordPress and BuddyPress to help create applications within Kidgab (such as quizzes, tests, and other awesome stuff). I am also using WampServer to host a testable server on my own laptop. I have personally been using Microsoft Word and Paint for helping me create and plan the quizzes and adventure stories.