Case study | Beehive & Com4 Tech for Safer Kindergarten Trips

About Beehive

The Beehive Project is the business idea that young Christian Johannessen had even before he started studying marketing: A tracking chip attached to the kindergarten children´s yellow vests, so that the kindergarten staff is alerted on the Beehive app if a child should leave the staff´s control. Along with other students, he was thus able to refine the idea. Beehive, which Johannessen started with a friend at 21 years old in 2019, has been supported by Innovation Norway.

Challenges

The kindergarten is among Norway´s most important institutions for supporting gender equality in the country – and children´s first encounter with lifelong learning. Most Norwegian children between one and six years old attend kindergarten every weekday. Trips outside the kindergarten´s own area are an important part of the education and the children´s need for activity. Such trips come with their own challenges: Every quarter, the children must be counted by the staff who take them on the trip, and this often occupies a significant part of the next quarter… In addition, there is the burden of being responsible for the most important thing in parents´lives. Today, kindergartens struggle with recruitment.

Solutions

When kindergarten children go on trips, they always wear high-visibility reflective vests.
Beehive has made these vests smart with its sensor, which transmits the location via SIM cards from Com4. As soon as the vests are taken from the hooks in the kindergarten, the staff member can follow the movements of each individual vest via a very user-friendly app – and Com4 handles the data flow of information. On the app, the staff member sets up a virtual fence. It can be at a playground or another place, where the staff member draws the fence on the app. Or it can be a dynamic fence, for example, always 30 meters around the staff member. The staff member is alerted when a child has moved outside the virtual fence several times within a given period.

Results

Beehive´s solution allows kindergarten staff to be more present as educators for the children. The solution enables counting of the children to be done more efficiently, while the staff member has far greater assurance that all the children are actually where they should be.

Although it may be challenging to measure, Beehive´s solution is designed to reduce the stress levels for the staff – and remove the lump in the stomach that naturally occurs with such a large responsibility for small children and lack of follow-up. Parents can also feel safer when the kindergarten is on a trip, and see the effects of more time spent playing than counting.

Children in kindergarten

265K +

Kindergartens

5K +

Minutes

15 +

Children must be counted every quarter when they are on a trip.

“Instead of physical fences determining where the trip goes, now the trip can determine where the fence should be."

“For an entrepreneurial company, the expertise of Com4 has been invaluable in developing our GPS tracking technology – and has elevated our capacity in a way we are very grateful for.”

“We want to make practical efforts to reduce the stress level among kindergarten staff. That is our contribution to making the kindergarten a more attractive workplace.”