13-year-old Trisha Prabhu has been made a finalist of Google’s global Science Fair for a project she has embarked upon which has seen her gathering research in order to stop cyberbullying.
Trisha has been named as 1 of the 15 finalists of the fair, after she gathered research regarding the scientific reasons behind cyberbullying and the reasons why teenagers choose to do it.
Trisha’s hypothesis was that cyberbullying more commonly takes place between teens because the part of the brain that helps with self-control, the prefrontal cortex, does not fully develop until the age 25. To prove her hypothesis, Trisha created the Rethink program, which saw her question a variety of students who admitted they would willingly post mean comments online. Her studies revealed that upon being asked to empathize with the people they cyberbullied, 93.43% of students decided to not make the comments.
With the results from her studies, Tasha hopes to create a Rethink app for social media sites in order to actively quell the rise of cyberbullying. In a statement on the Google Science Fair‘s official page, she wrote: “This Rethink mechanism may not only result in preventing cyber-bullying, it may also have a long-term, positive effect on adolescents’ decision-making skills, helping them not only on social media, but in the real world as well.”
Google is set to announce the winner of the competition in September, with the creator of the best project receiving a trip to the Virgin Galactic Spaceport, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands and $50,000 in scholarship funding.
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