Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games

Date Submitted: Apr 24, 2020
Date Accepted: May 31, 2021

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Gamifying Sexual Education for Adolescents in a Low-Tech Setting: Quasi-Experimental Design Study

Haruna H, Okoye K, Zainuddin Z, Mellecker R, Hu X, Chu S, Hosseini S

Gamifying Sexual Education for Adolescents in a Low-Tech Setting: Quasi-Experimental Design Study

JMIR Serious Games 2021;9(4):e19614

DOI: 10.2196/19614

PMID: 34636739

PMCID: 8548970

Gamifying Sexual Education for Adolescents in a Low-Tech Setting: A Quasi-Experimental Design

  • Hussein Haruna; 
  • Kingsley Okoye; 
  • Zamzami Zainuddin; 
  • Robin Mellecker; 
  • Xiao Hu; 
  • Samuel Chu; 
  • Samira Hosseini

ABSTRACT

Background:

Over the past few decades, unhealthy sexual behaviour presents to be a severe problem that disproportionately affects adolescents, and there is an increasing need for more effective ways of teaching them about sexual health. Majority of adolescents are exposed in the use of digital technologies; hence these digital tools can be useful and employed for educating them regarding sexual health promotion and prevention.

Objective:

To this effect, this paper looks at how the use of digital gamified instructions can help to improve and be of effect in educating adolescent about sexual health and address sexual and reproductive health challenges facing adolescent students in low-tech setting.

Methods:

In our study, the creation of the digital gamified methodology was developed using a participatory design research approach. Practically, the series of experimentations were conducted on a sample of 120 secondary school students, aged 11-15. Thus, using a quasi-experiment design, the students were not randomly assigned to either serious gaming or gamification, or traditional learning methods. Rather existing classes were either assigned to experimental groups and or control group. Consequently, we compare the effectiveness of the three methods for communicating sexual health knowledge.

Results:

The results show that gamified instructions (i.e. use of actual serious gaming in teaching) and gamification (making non-games, such as learning, game-like) proved more effective than the traditional methods for teaching sexual health education. Specifically, the average scores across groups demonstrated an increase of mean scores in the pre-test Mean 25.10 (SD 5.50) to post-test Mean 75.86 (SD 13.16), t119 = 41.252, P <.001 (2-tailed). ANOVA test indicated no significant differences across group for pre-test scores F2, 117 = 1. 048, P = .354. However, significant differences across groups were reported on post-test scores which indicated serious gaming and gamification students performed higher average scores than traditional learning group F2, 117 = 83.98, P <.001. Moreover, students benefited from serious gaming and gamification instructions they reported increased learning motivation, attitude, knowhow, and participation in the learning process (P <.001).

Conclusions:

In theory, this study notes that digital health technologies, including e-learning (particularly teaching and learning through gamified instructions and other novel approaches), have the potential of improving sexual health education. Ultimately the method can be useful towards achieving a knowledgeable generation of adolescent students on the subject matter.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Haruna H, Okoye K, Zainuddin Z, Mellecker R, Hu X, Chu S, Hosseini S

Gamifying Sexual Education for Adolescents in a Low-Tech Setting: Quasi-Experimental Design Study

JMIR Serious Games 2021;9(4):e19614

DOI: 10.2196/19614

PMID: 34636739

PMCID: 8548970

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.