BASE Education Firewords FAQ
What is a Fireword™? | A fireword™ is one or more words that a student types while taking a course that the system determines to be potentially dangerous, either to the student or their peers. If a fireword™ is detected, the system will send out an email notification to the student’s supervising adult. |
How are they captured? | When a student is taking a course, they are asked to answer several questions throughout. As a student types, the system analyzes the text and identifies potentially dangerous language, even if the student deletes it from their final response. The sentence that contained the fireword(s)™ is captured and displayed in the admin portal for review by the supervising adult. |
What do you mean by “potentially dangerous”? |
In the context of firewords™, “potentially dangerous” refers to language indicating that either (1) the student may be willing/planning to do serious physical harm to themselves or someone they know or (2) that they are being seriously abused by someone else. For example, “I am going to punch my friend,” is not considered potentially dangerous because while this phrase indicates somewhat violent behavior, it is not dangerous enough to warrant a notification to the supervising adult. However, “I am going to kill my friend” would be flagged as a fireword™ because it indicates the possibility of serious physical harm. |
Why was/wasn’t _____ flagged as a fireword™? | The system checks for certain words and phrases and determines whether they could be dangerous or not based on the context in which they were used. It also takes misspellings into account. This means there could be some false positives on the detection of dangerous language. We understand that the system isn't perfect, but we are working to improve it all the time. Keep in mind that we like to be cautious and prefer to flag things that might not be dangerous in favor of missing something that could be considered dangerous. |
Is there a list of firewords™ that we can access? | We don't have an exact list of firewords™. This is because most of the dangerous language we try to identify requires an evaluation of the context in which it was used. However, to give you a better idea of what we consider potentially dangerous, we have provided a list of phrases below that would be flagged as firewords™. |
Can we suggest new words/phrases to be flagged as a fireword™? | Yes! We will gladly take feedback about how the system is working as well as suggestions around what language you think should be classified as potentially dangerous. While it’s not guaranteed that we will add it to our system, we will seriously consider it. |
What are some example words/phrases that would be flagged as Firewords™? | ||
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As you can see, a few of these phrases may be harmless, but when students use words like “hang” “dead,” “kill,” or “suicidal,” we prefer to err on the side of caution, notify the supervising adult, and let them make the final call on whether or not it is dangerous language.
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