In the US, many schools provide sex education to students as a part of health education. However, there is a huge gap in conventional sex education on the emotional and psychosocial aspects of sex. Teenagers often lack a safe space to share information about the psychological part of relationships. This novel game LEX helps teenagers learn common issues and practical solutions for building up healthy relationships. The impact of inaction can be huge. Without knowledge about the emotional and psychological aspects of sex, teenagers won't be able to establish psychosocial development and well-being throughout adolescence and even adulthood.
View the Landing Page for more details.
We are a group of students from the Information School at the University of Washington.
- Catherine Miao: Backend & Frontend Dev
- Susan Yang: Frontend Dev, PM
- Whitney Zhang: UI/UX Designer
- Joy Zhang: Data Analyst
Our contact information will be shown at the end of this page. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions!
63% of teenagers in the US have experienced dating and 35% of them have some dating experience or romantic relationships. A large portion of experiences or skills such as the conflict-solving skill from high-school dating is brought to future marriages. There’s also a lack of comprehensive sex education among teens in the US, where emotional and psychosocial aspects are not being taught. we want to solve the problem of how might teenagers (15-19) in the U.S. who do not receive enough relationship education achieve comprehensive knowledge about healthy relationships by learning its social, psychological, and emotional impacts so that they can understand and practice healthy relationships?
Lack of trusted and supportive relationships, as well as comfortable and open conversations between teen and their teacher, parents, and peer about sexual development and orientation to avoid misconceptions. Teenagers have varying attitudes towards sex/relationships, which we found are potentially due to classes not being very engaging, and a lack of connection to real life and real issues. And lastly, the content of sex education students received is limited. There is a lack of content in human development, relationships, personal skills, and society and culture, which leads to poor understanding of mutuality, healthy communication, and psychological development.
Please refer to the Lieracy Research Source file in the repo for all the sources of research.
- Interview more users and add more features. With limited time, we were not able to conduct as much interviews as we want. Future developers should interview more users and further improve the game. For example, developers could add voice-over or more sound effects.
- Research for more real stories and creating storylines for different genders to be more inclusive. Our current game only focuses on the girl side, we wish the future developer to consider male protagonist, non-binary gender, homosexual, and so on.
- Add more user interactions to make the game more engaging. For example, add quizzes or interactive games when the users are making choices. Developers could refer to the video game Florence to gain insights.
We use a game engine called Monogatari and wrote codes in javascript. The backend codes for page routing, menu creation, and other core functions are built by the Monogatari already. For a more detailed documentation, please refer to Monogatari’s documentation.
To start writing codes, please clone this repository to your own desktop.
Scripts: Please use the script.js to add new storylines. Monogatari’s documentation has provided clear instructions on how to create new dialogs, add character images, add background music and so on. All current storylines can be find in this Game Script Doc. Note: In the doc, the stories are written in third person point of view, while in the actual game, we changed it into first person to provide users better playing experiences.
CSS: Change the styles in the main.css file. If cannot find the class name to write css code for the specific item, please utilize the inspect function → styles → in your browser to view the class name of that item.
Education Resources: All resources are listed in the script google doc we provided above in the Scripts section, as well at the top of the script.js file.
Images & Sounds: All images and sounds can be found in this Game Drawing Folder. Future teams are encouraged to create more character images that share a similar style. All background images, scenes, music, and sounds are found online. We recommend using freesound.org to find free sounds.
- Joy Zhang wenhuz3@uw.edu
- Susan Yang xuanry@uw.edu
- Catherine Miao md0615@uw.edu
- Whitney Zhang qiaoyi@uw.edu