Sam Explorers
Sam Explores offers an innovative solution designed to enhance parental knowledge and understanding of the value inherent in comprehensive sexuality education during a child's early years. Our application provides personalisation features, enabling users to tailor content, schedule information, and access educational resources to support their child's learning journey. This approach not only promotes improved parent-child conversations about sexuality education but also ensures that learning is a continuous, engaging process.
Introduction
In the context of Australian society, comprehensive sexuality education is a lifelong learning process for individuals. Beginning in childhood, public citizens will commence to receive education in physical, emotional, mental and social in sexual health, sexual consent and healthy relationships. A position statement from Family Planning Alliance Australia (FPAA) indicates that comprehensive relationships and sexuality education is effective in reducing the occurrence of unplanned risks, including pregnancy, abortion and contraction of sexually transmitted diseases. I aim to explore how discussing scenarios about sexuality education take place between children and their parents, and how parents can overcome gaps with children to help them develop sexual health.
Problem Statement
Several social and cultural considerations influence the extent to which parents are open to addressing sexual education with their children. Consequently, a significant proportion of children in our nation lack comprehensive sexuality education and anti-aggression prevention during their formative years, which can put them into a lifelong trajectory of victimisation or perpetration. Parental awareness of the nature of child sexual education remains limited, leading to a general reluctance to broach the topic of appropriate prevention and guidance with their children.
Iteration 4
To address the problem of inadequate sex education and barriers preventing parent-child conversations around sex-related topics, we have designed and iterated Sam Explores, an interactive product and mobile application targeting both young children between the ages of 5 and 12 and parents/carers. Developed from our initial idea through further research and various iterations, our final design concept consists of two components: an interactive digital storybook and a mobile application, where each component targets different audience.
Target Audience
As mentioned above, our target audience for our final design concept are split between two groups:
• Parents/Carers
• Children between the ages of 5-12 (Primary School Age)
Our storybook is made for children, filled with fun and interactive features that keep them engaged. Each story focuses on a different topic like the body, respect, boundaries, family, and diversity. The content is tailored to suit the child’s age. As kids read, they complete challenges and quizzes to help them better understand important ideas. The feedback they get reinforces what they’ve learned and corrects any misunderstandings.
We also have a mobile app for parents and guardians. It helps them stay involved in their child’s sex education, track their learning, and understand what’s being taught. Our research shows that many parents find it hard to talk openly about sex education because they feel unsure, embarrassed, or uncomfortable. Sam Explores supports both children and parents—helping parents learn how to talk about these topics in a clear, open, and judgment-free way.
Design Process
1. User Research
Several social and cultural considerations influence the extent to which parents are open to addressing sexual education with their children. Consequently, a significant proportion of children in our nation lack comprehensive sexuality education and anti-aggression prevention during their formative years, which can put them into a lifelong trajectory of victimisation or perpetration. Parental awareness of the nature of child sexual education remains limited, leading to a general reluctance to broach the topic of appropriate prevention and guidance with their children.
2. Design Iteration
Wireframes
