NEWS | Three junior high students from Philippine Science High School Caraga built an online platform called Ligtas Skwela to help schools track exactly where every student is during emergencies like fires, earthquakes, or shootings. It just won first place among nine finalists at a regional student tech competition held in Butuan City from August 27 to 29.
The team, project leader Kush Shekar, developer Lorenzo Pariñas, and market research head Vic Andrei Hernando, said recent school emergencies, including the shooting at Ateneo de Zamboanga University, pushed them to build something better than the usual headcount. The platform runs on two modes, Teacher Mode lets faculty report their classroom's condition in real time, while Commander Mode gives administrators a full view of every classroom, which teacher is managing it, and which students are still unaccounted for by name, not just by number.
BMN sees this as a quiet indictment of how far behind most schools actually are. The fact that three teenagers had to build this themselves, in their spare time, says a lot about how many schools nationwide are still depending on manual headcounts during the exact moments when every second and every name matters.
The platform is already working and has been tested on their own campus, though the team says it is still early and they plan to expand it further while applying for a patent.
If a group of high schoolers can build something this useful with basic resources, why isn't every school in the country already asking for something just like it?
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