On the 20th of December, Google announced the fourth edition of its annual “Web Rangers” contest which will reward school students who know how to stay smart, safe and savvy online.
Launched in 2015, in India, the contest aims to empower more and more young children to participate in the global brigade of Web Rangers and help the society to make web a safer place for everyone.
With multiple student ambassadors spread over 15 countries, the competition involves the participants to employ their creativity and mettle through which they may illustrate the significance of cyber safety.
The program will reward seven Web Rangers, after screening thousands of entries. This online contest has two major categories that the participants may choose from, namely – Project and Campaign.
The students may choose any category that interests them and put their creativity and skills to test.
In the “Campaign” category, the participants have to run their Internet safety campaign, either individually or as a team of three. It could be one significant initiative or a collection of multiple projects like a social media campaign, a video series, awareness drives or all of them – there is no restriction on the format or the number of initiatives, Google said.
In the “Project” category – for those who prefer to work individually – the contestant has to create a video, website, app or a game that empower users to stay safe on the Internet.
According to different sources, children are getting exposed to the Internet from the age of three and are spending twice the amount of time on internet screens than their parents’ think they do. Thus, it is crucial for us to initiate a dialogue on the dangers and threats of the cyber world, that they may be exposed to while surfing the internet.
The Web Rangers contest is one of the many initiatives by Google India to promote awareness about Digital Citizenship and Internet Safety among all age groups in the country.
In the last three years, they have been working proactively to partner with many like-minded organizations — for example, collaboration with NCERT to bring lessons on ‘Digital Citizenship’ to Indian classrooms and to integrate internet safety modules with the curriculum; both structured to match the intellectual and curiosity needs of different age groups.
The contest is open to students within the age group of 10 and 17 years, and the deadline for submitting the entry is 23:59 pm on January 21, Google said.