CHALLENGE

Adolescent births and sexually transmitted infections are serious public health issues. There is an urgent need for effective HIV, STI, and pregnancy prevention interventions at the middle school level to delay or mitigate the consequences of early sexual activity. However, in the US, most students are not receiving sex education or are receiving it too late to fully protect themselves against STIs and pregnancy. Parents are concerned about their children becoming sexually active, acquiring HIV, or getting pregnant yet often feel embarrassed to discuss sex and believe they lack time, knowledge, and skills to communicate successfully with their child. Youth want to talk with their parents about sex but feel their parents need help to be better communicators.

In collaboration with UT Health, the Radiant team developed an innovative game-based tool to support conversations between parents and teens regarding relationships, dating and sex.

OUR SOLUTION

Radiant and UT Health developed a theoretically- and empirically-based interactive game that addresses teen pregnancy, HIV and STDs. This work resulted in an innovative home-based resource for a challenge faced by every family with sexually maturing youth.

During development of the Seven Stones program, Radiant employed an iterative and evolutionary systems development process based on the Agile software development methodology. Input from the all stakeholders, including representative users, was sought throughout each stage of program development.

RESULTS

Using this agile approach, our team delivered a solution that incorporated the following features:

• A web-based portal for parents that provided training, support resources and guided parent-child activities.
• An extensive quest adventure game experience for teens that encompassed 18 levels of play, and over 100 unique activities.

The program was evaluated in a randomized controlled trial with 80 parent-child dyads; publication of study results is pending.