What it does
This is a system of sexual assault prevention education products designed for children with hearing impairment, enabling pre-school children with hearing impairment to learn about body awareness, establishing sexual protection and crisis response.
Your inspiration
In a re-examination of The Melting Pot, we find deaf children in court attempting to allege assault in sign language, only to be dismissed on the grounds of ‘inability to communicate and confusion of expression’. The film, adapted from true events, shook us into focusing on the plight of children with hearing impairments facing sexual violence. According to UNESCO's International Technical Guidelines on Sexuality Education, about 20 per cent of females and between five and 10 per cent of males report having experienced sexual violence as a child. Sex education for the prevention of child sexual abuse is therefore crucial.
How it works
Food-grade silicone plus flocking material bear as the core carrier, integration of OLED face screen, flexible light board, NFC, micro-motor, etc., with cards and foldable three-dimensional scene book, combined to contain 4 progressive education module system: (1) Body Cognition: Learning body parts knowledge and sign language through body cards to strengthen the knowledge of private parts. (2) Situational Learning: Place the bear in a specific scene in the scene book and use the character cards to simulate touching and guide learning through multimodal feedback. (3) Simulation practice: Parents play the role of the character cards and simulate a complex scene with the child, and the child responds with ‘acceptance/rejection’. (4) Emergency drill: Using the SOS card, the child removes the tail badge and wears it on his/her clothing, and presses the badge button for 3 seconds to complete the emergency call for help.
Design process
After research, we learnt about the difficulties faced by hearing impaired children in sex education and used KL analysis to deconstruct the cognitive characteristics of them, using visual and tactile sensory surrogates for a better experience for hearing impaired children. Our team brainstormed on how to play with teaching aids, and finally adopted the use of dolls as a carrier - children can use the bear dolls to match their body parts with those of the human body, and learn about their own body structure and boundaries by touching the bears. We encountered a lot of trouble in the process of determining the specific game mechanism, such as matching the children's perception of the bear with their own bodies, and how to make the children aware of the boundaries of touching in different scenarios, etc. We finally settled on the general direction of ‘entities + cards’. We drew a large number of sketches of bear dolls, and determined the bear shape that can appear friendly and friendly, but also clearly show the body structure. The visual system of the card deck adopts a unified gesture style and arrow labelling to ensure that the sign language labelling is clear and easy to understand, and the NFC touch recognition area is labelled to prevent incorrect recognition.
How it is different
The first multimodal interactive preventive sexual assault game visualisation education system: innovative integration of physical bear toys, wearing alarm magnetic badges, NFC physical education cards, the introduction of a game-based teaching mode, to create ‘hardware interaction + scenario-based learning + emergency protection’ an integrated education model, to fill the systematic design of hearing impaired children's sexual assault education products. Gap. Accurately adapting to the characteristics of hearing impaired children: Based on the research results of multi-modal physiological signals of hearing impaired children, vibration feedback, light prompts, sign language cards, etc., visual, tactile, vibration and other multi-sensory experiences are integrated into the education process, breaking through the traditional limitations of a single visual teaching, and matching the information receiving habits of hearing impaired children.
Future plans
Planning for small batch scale production, using early childhood schools as service points, building a platform for communities, families, and children with disabilities, and deepening the hands-on data on sexual protection education. Simultaneously promote the iteration of prototypes to optimise children's use scenarios and interaction methods. Establish a content feedback and optimisation mechanism to optimise the presentation and difficulty level of the educational content based on children's behavioural data and parents' feedback.
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