PSHE and play: using games in sex education

Look back to your school sex education with adult eyes, and you probably remember some poor teacher standing up in front of a class of giggling, scandalised or bored teenagers, teaching them how to put a condom on. Maybe a diagram of the uterus.

These days PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economics education), as it’s now called, goes much deeper into the territory of emotions and moral frameworks. I’ve just finished a piece of R&D, called Conversation Pieces, looking at the use of games in PSHE classes – specifically games which use historical objects and societies to get teenagers to think about power, control, and gender issues in their own, contemporary world, which is an important part of the PSHE syllabus.

The Conversation Pieces project uses games and historical objects to get young people talking in their sex education classes. Picture: Wellcome Images

That syllabus concludes with this call to action: “It is essential that schools can help children and young people develop confidence in talking, listening and thinking about sex and relationships”, and this is the territory in which I think games can be most useful.

Encouraging discussion

It’s not always easy to design lessons that break through the awkwardness to get a classroom of students to actually sit in a classroom situation and talk about themselves, whether its what kind of relationships they want, or how about the risk of exploitation in the complicated emotionally fraught world of being a teenager.

Part of how PSHE lessons accomplish that task is by ‘othering’ – framing the lesson around something which is specifically not about the people in the room. It takes the pressure off asking questions and proffering opinions if you’re not talking about you, you’re talking about other people. I got involved because games are great at bridging that gap between you and an alien society. Asking the player to make hard decisions in order to win, within a system whose rules are different from the system you live in.

The game that worked best modelled the systems and heirarchy of the medieval chinese court, by framing all the students as concubines, competing to conceive children with the emperor, then trying to get their own child elected as the next emperor. Getting the students to step into a historical society with rigidly enforced system of gender and power roles worked well. It framed the lesson not about the people in the room, but about what it must have been like to live in the society that demanded those rules. Getting into that mindset required an imaginative leap from the students which effectively framed their subsequent discussions to be deeper and mostly free from embarrassment.

Games about society will always be simplified models. They are the designer’s distillation of a particular society or situation, but that simplification can provide a way in to looking at a situation from multiple perspectives. Teasing out how a particular society is more complicated than the way its been portrayed, whether in a game or a headline, is a staple of these discussions.

Promising results

In our testing, we found that pupils took the conversational bait offered, and themselves turned those conversations onto present day issues that concerned them. They surprised themselves with their honesty and forthrightness. Evaluations came back full of statements like “It was the fact that people were joining in the discussion that surprised me, like it turned from a talk about something … into, like, modern issues, and everyone actually gave their opinion.”

They talked about the lessons in their tutor groups, they talked to their parents. Several weeks later, they could remember the lessons in detail and talked eloquently about the objects and games they had played.

“Our group was a lot more mature than I thought they was going to be, a lot more mature. I thought everyone was just going to go in and start laughing and not shut up but…I think when we actually got into conversation about stuff… our conversations were going on for a long time”

Design the lesson

My takeaways from the research? It’s about designing a lesson, not just a game

• Time is really important. A really focussed five or ten minute game surrounded by discussion is much more useful than something with massive depth and replayability.
• Teachers are so busy that if you’re designing for use inside the classroom, then looking up the curriculum linkups, and suggesting what the segue into discussion and the learning outcomes are makes your design much more useful.
• Teachers who aren’t used to games can be easily spooked – a teachers guide to what will happen and how to be good at the game will help acceptance.

Conversation Pieces was funded by the REACT Pump Priming fund.