Over 3,000 students from across Europe have taken centre stage in the Skills Upload Jr (SUJ) Challenge, presenting creative, youth led solutions to support digital wellbeing and healthier online experiences for children and teenagers.
The SUJ Challenge builds on our long term commitment to digital wellbeing, reinforcing the findings of our Connected Childhood research. Conducted in collaboration with Save the Children, the research found that only 1 in 4 (26%) young people rate good or high on new digital wellbeing index and almost half (45%) worry about missing out when offline.
The research highlights how deeply digital technology is woven into children’s lives, and the need for young people to be involved in designing solutions for the digital world they are growing up in.
This year’s SUJ Challenge invited students to propose solutions that could promote digital wellbeing through the thoughtful use of technology. The responses capture the multifaceted nature of young people’s digital experiences, covering everything from screen time, emotional health and misinformation to digital threats, responsible device usage, online interactions and AI.
Students from Albania, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Türkiye competed in the challenge. Along the way they built their skills and knowledge through individual and group training in digital wellbeing, technology, project design and active learning, delivered by over 60 volunteers – many of whom are Vodafone and VOIS employees
This year’s overall winner is “CALMify AI” from Greece. Students identified increasing levels of study‑related stress that affects focus and well‑being, highlighting the need for supportive, unobtrusive technological interventions. Their concept – CALMify AI – would use artificial intelligence to detect signs of anxiety through posture and facial cues and automatically activate personalised calming music to create a more supportive and focused learning environment.
The judges recognised the project for its strong overall concept and relevance to young people’s digital lives. In addition, they awarded honourable mentions to projects from:
- Turkey, for the creativity in their idea to create AI enabled camera monitoring that could provide personalised, real time alerts to reduce screentime.
- Romania, for the quality of their proposed technological solution. Their AI enabled app would analyse children’s emotional context to provide personalised guidance, monthly summaries of emotional patterns, and notifications for parents during more challenging periods.
- Spain, for the ability to clearly identify and define the digital wellbeing challenge of loneliness and limited emotional supervision, making it difficult to identify and respond to signs of distress at an early stage.
Together, these projects demonstrate the power of youth innovation in tackling complex digital wellbeing issues – not just through technology, but through empathy, awareness and peer to peer understanding.
Lisa Felton, Managing Director, Vodafone Foundation said: “The Skills Upload Jr Challenge shows that young people are not only affected by the digital world – they are shaping it. Their ideas reflect the themes we see in our research, in our classrooms and in our homes. It is vital that we listen to, learn from and include young people when it comes to improving digital wellbeing. As this challenge shows, they have the solutions for the digital world that they are growing up in.”
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