Discovery · Systems Project 11
Living Well Online
The same six words land differently on different people.
Student PIN:
Try It — Draw How You Feel
In your notebook, draw four small faces or emojis — one for each feeling below. Draw them your own way.
| Feeling | How I drew it |
|---|---|
| Pleased | |
| Tired of this | |
| Just joking | |
| Leave me alone |
Now show your drawings to a partner — without telling them which is which. Let them guess.
| Question | My answer |
|---|---|
| How many did they get right? | |
| Which one did they read completely differently? |
Their reading was different from what you meant. Does that make them wrong?
Now try it with words
Read this message three times — once as a joke between friends, once as annoyed, once as genuinely unkind. “wow. nice job.“
Could all three readings be right? What is missing that would tell you which one was meant?
Online, Everything Helpful Is Missing
Face to face you get a voice, a face, and a pause. In a message you get none of it.
So the person reading fills the gap themselves — with whatever mood they happen to be in.
Learn It — Being Good at This
means behaving well in a place where you cannot see anybody’s face.
It is harder than being decent in person, for four reasons.
| What is missing | What that causes |
|---|---|
| No tone of voice | A joke reads as an insult |
| No face in front of you | It is easier to be harsher than you would ever be out loud |
| No pause | You send before you have thought |
| It does not go away | A message can be screenshotted and kept for years |
Cyberbullying
is using messages, posts, photos, or group chats to hurt, frighten, or humiliate somebody.
It is not the same as a disagreement, and it is not the same as one unkind remark that gets apologised for. It usually keeps going, and it usually has an audience.
If It Happens to You
Telling Someone Is Not Telling Tales
Some people worry that reporting it will make things worse or get them called a snitch.
Telling a trusted adult about someone being hurt is not the same as getting somebody into trouble for nothing. Adults have ways to help that you do not have.
The third person in the room
Most online unkindness has three parts — the person doing it, the person it is aimed at, and everybody watching.
That last group is the , and it is usually the biggest.
⚠ Doing Nothing Is a Choice
Laughing, sharing, adding an emoji, or just leaving it there all tell the person doing it that this is fine.
You do not have to fight anybody. Sending one private message to the person being targeted — that was not okay, are you alright? — changes the whole thing.
Working well with your own team
The same thing applies to how you build robots together.
- Give proper for code that is not yours. Somebody wrote it, and it is their .
- Find the goal you share, and work toward that rather than toward being right.
- Keep everybody safe — with tools, with the robot, and with what you say.
Do It — Say It Better
1. Rewrite the sharp message
Somebody on your team sends this after a bad practice run: “that was useless. you broke it again.“
Rewrite it so it says the same thing about the problem without being about the person.
2. Add what is missing
Take the message “wow. nice job.” and write it three ways so that nobody could mistake which one you meant.
| Meant as… | How I would write it |
|---|---|
| A real compliment | |
| A friendly joke | |
| Honest frustration |
Most people reach for more words, or an emoji, or a name. All three are ways of putting the missing tone back in.
3. Where could this happen?
List the kinds of place where people your age talk to each other online — apps, games, group chats, comment sections, school systems.
| Kind of place | Could unkindness happen here? |
|---|---|
This next part stays in your notebook
Look back over your list. Quietly, just for yourself, mark any place where you have seen this happen — to you, to someone else, or where you were part of it.
Do not write that here and do not share it. It is yours. If any of it is still bothering you, that is exactly the thing to take to an adult you trust.
4. What would you do?
Work through these with a partner.
| Situation | What I would do |
|---|---|
| A group chat starts making fun of someone who is not in it. | |
| Someone sends you a mean photo of a classmate and asks you to pass it on. | |
| You post something as a joke and someone replies that it upset them. | |
| A message keeps arriving from an account you do not recognise. | |
| A teammate takes credit for code you wrote. |
The Third One Is the Hard One
You meant no harm and somebody was hurt anyway. Both of those are true at once.
What you meant explains it. What they felt is still real. A good apology deals with the second without arguing about the first.
5. Who would you tell?
Name three adults you could go to. Different ones, so that you always have somebody.
| # | Who | Where I would find them |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||
| 2 | ||
| 3 |
Write them somewhere you will still have them in six months. The time you need this list is not the time you want to be thinking about it.
6. Write your team agreement
Your team needs its own rules for working together. Agree five. Everybody signs.
| # | On this team, we… |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 |
7. Credit where it is due
Go through your file. Find anything you did not write yourself — a snippet from another team, something a teacher showed you, code from a website.
| What I used | Where it came from | Credited? |
|---|---|---|
Add a naming the source above anything that was missing one.
Score It — Checkpoint
Credit what you borrow in your library, and remember what a bystander can do.
What would help most?
| Situation | Best first move |
|---|---|
| Someone is being picked on in a group chat | |
| An unkind message arrives about you | |
| You realise something you sent hurt somebody | |
| It keeps happening after you blocked them |
Can you do it again?
Think about it
Your partner read one of your emojis completely differently. If that can happen with a drawing you made on purpose, what does it say about sending things quickly?
Most people watching unkindness online do nothing at all. It is not that they approve. So why is it so hard to be the one who says something?
Your team agreement only matters on the day somebody breaks it. What makes a team actually keep to rules it wrote itself?
Next
You have looked at what technology does to the way people treat each other. Technology also changes what people are able to do at all.
In Systems Project 12 — Technology and People, you weigh up what it has given us, what it has cost, and who gets left out.
When you are finished, press the button to turn in your work and save a copy.
KIPR · Botball Explorer · Discovery