One of the problems that most affects society today road safety. Road actors don’t comply with the rules stipulated and in just a moment, by committing any infraction they can be exposed and expose others to a great tragedy.
Can we change this? Is there a way to give it a solution? Can technology help us? The answer is Yes. We don't need to wait to be adults to make some positive changes and we decided to take advantage of the technology and we an App, CTVAI – Cuida tu Vida al Instante (Take Care of Your Life Instantly). This is our contribution to promote road safety!
Tes Idées
At Margarita Bosco College, teachers and guidelines seek to create and promote road intelligence in students. A year and a half ago, there were activities on road safety and it was clear that there was a lack of knowledge among students regarding traffic signs and rules that should be followed by road users.
Taking this event as a basis, we decided to investigate a little more about this problem and we asked different students what they knew about road safety. From their answers, we realized than more of 50% of the interviewed students had a scarce knowledge on the subject.
We were informed by our teacher of IT, Luis Soto Mesa, of the competition in road safety and we liked the idea of participating.
We hear reports of road accidents daily. Some of the consequences are mild, but others cause serious injuries and deaths.
A world full of road insecurity is what we have created little by little, thus being one of the most frequent problems and the main cause of the increasing death rates in many countries. But can we change this? Is there a way to solve it?
The answer to the above questions is yes. We do not need to wait to be adults to achieve change, technology is a tool, why not take advantage of it? And this way, the project CTVAI- Cuida tu Vida al Instante (Take care of your life instantly) came to our minds.
We decided to start with a research and we build a survey made of two parts. The first consisted of different questions about road safety in general, such as: traffic signs, road actors, laws. The second consisted of questions about our application in which we wanted to understand expectations and needs. The survey was disseminated through text messages and emails and we reached 319 persons that also forwarded the survey to their contacts. As developers of the survey, we previously had a goal of 200 people surveyed, but we received 197 respondents in total, our goal was met with an approximate percentage of 98.5%.
From our finding we can highlight positive and negative aspects.
Positive aspects: 97% of the surveyed population has some kind of knowledge about traffic signs, 82.2% of the population recognizes the different road actors, 59.4% recognize the maximum speed on the main roads. More than half of the surveyed population finds it easy to learn in a theoretical-practical way, which allows the learning possibilities to be high.
Negative aspects: 1.69% of people are not clear about the differentiation of the signals, approximately half and even a little more of the surveyed population is not aware of Law 1503 of 2011, 13% of the population does not recognize the way in which CTVAI can be applied in their daily life.
As a general conclusion of our research, more than 50% of the students hadn’t basic knowledge and those who claimed to have it dint’ put it into practice.
Tes initiatives
CTVAI is our project, conformed by an App and a website, and our aim is to reduce road insecurity rates and contribute to road safety education through technology. We want people to learn road safety subjects and for those who already know about it to strengthen their knowledge.
CTVAI - Application
The application is divided into 8 sections:
- Principal Screen: Problems to deal with and hiperlink to the games.
- Reflection: Hiperlinks to each of the screens.
- News: User can publish and inform in real time accidents or important news that happens in the Street.
- Videos: Audiovisual media made by Margarita Bosco School to remember and clarify some basic concepts of road safety.
- Memes: learn, reflect and have fun.
- Games: In this section users can choose between the games aforedmentioned.
- Minion game: Help the minion to cross correctly the avenue.
- Racings: allow multiple gamers at the same time
CTVAI – Website
Our website contains the norms, emergency lines, national code of coexistence, road signs of Colombia and also the section where we will publish all the links of the conferences that we will carry out to training other people on road safety subjects.
The website contains basic data related to road safety - norms, emergency lines, and national code of coexistence, road signs of Colombia - and a section in which we will publish the links of the different virtual meetings that we will lead to promote road safety training. Our first conference will be on May 30 of 2020, in which we will explain our project.
Our plan was going to schools and talk to them about our project and use these sessions to deliver some training on road safety. With the quarantine situation we had to redefine new ways of reaching people. We used zoom and google meet conferences, and we used social networks for our benefit. We created a banner and published in our social media, and we also put in some strategic places where we live.
It is important to highlight that the project is developed under the objective of raising awareness and encouraging people to continually learn and practice traffic regulations having technology as a supportive tool.
