DiscoverMe: Part 1
WHY?
In the DiscoverMe team, we found that there is a need for increased availability of anatomical, sexual, and consent-based education resources for children with physical disabilities. Through research and experience, we found a lack of resources with appropriate representation and information. This correlates to a devastatingly high rate of sexual assault in the disabled community. In addition, people with disabilities have lessened self esteem and an increased risk of depression compared to able bodied individuals. Because of this, we have concluded that understanding the physical body and the concept of consent from a young age is crucial for those with disabilities.
HOW?
Something unique about our project is that there is no definitively correct answer! The topic of sexual education and safety is so complex and adding in the extra dimension of being disability inclusive only brings more to the table. By no means are we experts on these subjects, and that means there is a lot of work to be done to make sure that we find a way to give our community partner and their family what they need while also being within the scope of our abilities.
So… we began by brainstorming and doing our own research on the intersections of Sex Education and disabilities. The diverse ways to tackle these topics and the range of content was empowering by overwhelming. Next, we had the first meeting with our community partner which helped narrow our focus to physical disabilities like muscular dystrophy and understand the needs of this demographic. From there, we broke up into front end and back end teams, with the front end team doing much of the research and concept generation while the back end team focused on learning how to actually create our website from code. After several meetings of concept ideation, we had our first design review where we got to speak with our community partner and her pediatrician and get specific feedback.
CURRENT IDEA
Our current idea is to create a game based learning webpage. The website will have a home page menu with tabs for the individuals profile and parent resources. The profile will be a way for the user to create their own avatar from a variety of inclusive options, such as assistive devices and diverse body types. As this avatar, the user will maneuver through the many games catered to different topics that help children learn about health and safety topics. Through brainstorming, we decided to create games that allow one to learn at their own pace through exploration. Additionally, there will be rewards for achievements to promote problem solving while learning and playing.
Our potential game ideas include matching card games, maze games, and detective games to learn body parts and scenario games to learn about healthy social relationships and personal safety. Additional topics we hope to cover through different games include body positivity, friendship, public and private spaces, and good interactions.
LEARN AND APPLY
From the design review, we received advice on how to better address reproductive and sexual health to our age group of 6–8 years old. Our community partner’s pediatrician suggested that we focus our interactive games on structure and function surrounding reproductive anatomy, rather than puberty and sex given that our community partner given the level of undestanding and exploration of this group. Therefore, our website will more comprehensively incorporate interactive games with reproductive anatomy and structure. For example, we anticipate including a match game where our community partner places the body parts in the correct anatomical locations and then matches the structures to their functions. We plan to include resources in our “parents tab” for older children with disabilities who are breaching the topic of puberty. Overall, this design review gave us new ideas on how to better address reproductive and sexual health for our community partner.
NEAR FUTURE GOALS
For design review 2, we want to build low fidelity prototypes of each page on our website in order to test the functionality of our design. We also want to have a completed library of JavaScript code for the backbone of our games. We plan to integrate the feedback we received from design review 1 and adjust the scope of our website accordingly. Our community partner’s pediatrician gave us some valuable input on how to present our information to kids, and we will keep this in mind as we build content for our website. We also want to build and finalize the home page on our website by the second design review. This will help us get one step closer to our final product, a fully functioning website designed to teach our community partner about her body. We can’t wait to share our final result!
