Sexual education lessons in school need no longer be synonymous with embarrassed teachers putting condoms on bananas in front of giggling groups of teenagers. An ambitious pilot scheme, commissioned by the ministry of education and funded by the European Union, has a more advanced plan in the form of a CD ROM to help adolescents develop a healthy sexual identity.

Despite its vague title 'Gender Relations', the CD deals with very specific issues from puberty to sexual harassment, maternity to gay relations. Media theorist Corina Pateli, responsible for creating the project's digital environment, says the CD's aim is to enable 13-18 year olds to explore human sexuality, deconstruct myths, and learn about sexually-transmitted diseases and contraception.

Multimedia empathy

"The most important thing for teenagers is to realise that sexual identity is personal, that it should not be dictated. It is also important to point out that sex is not just about bodily functions but also pleasure." To help adolescents see the bigger picture the CD has an hour's worth of brief animated stories where the user, through role-playing, faces plausible dilemmas and is called to act. The multimedia platform enables the story to be shaped by the user's decisions. Certain stories are designed to put users in unlikely positions: "In a story where a female character is trying to decide whether she is ready to have sex for the first time male users are made to go through the motions of what this entails from a female point of view. By being this character they gain an insight of female sexuality that may help them shape a more realistic perception of women."

Pateli is quick to point out that apart from being able to provide interactive material there are many other advantages to the medium: "Because sexuality is a very personal matter and one that teenagers feel uncomfortable discussing with adults the project is designed to allow users the maximum possible degree of privacy in the social environment of the school."

Realism vs. pornography

Lifelike presentation while avoiding pornography has been a major challenge. "In order to make teenagers feel more comfortable about their changing body it is essential to show the human form naked. In order for students to identify with the bodies on the screen illustration must be realistic, without the CD being used by people for the wrong reasons."

Designing educational material, particularly in commercially developed countries is difficult says Pateli. "Designers are used to creating CDs with very standardised navigation structure. They use menus, and assume that the user wants to feel in control of the information. In educational material where the objective is partly factual and partly to encourage analytical skills a standardised format does not work. Creating a CD on sexual education that looks like a computer game gives the impression that the final aim is domination. When we are trying to show that sex is not about winners and losers but choice and understanding such design is highly inappropriate."

Educational tool

When creating multimedia to be used as an educational tool, changing the perceptions of other educators can be challenging. "Most people who have been trained in social science or education do not have multimedia training. As a result their perception of the subject rarely relates to the medium. Effectively they expect a CD ROM to be designed like a book, failing to take advantage of the additional facilities the medium provides."

The project contains eight thematic units from which the teacher can choose the most relevant parts for each group of students creating individual modules to be used in class. During the course teacher and student can interact through a dialogue box. The teacher has access to some of the students' data including the number of factual questions students get wrong and the list of most frequently asked questions. Using this data the teacher can further shape the course to tackle specific issues.

Pateli say that in the hypothetical scenario even if all Greek schools were equipped with computers, implementing the project would be difficult because there are not enough computer-literate teachers. "New technologies are gendered as are teachers. 90 percent of school teachers are female while in primary school the number is close to 100 percent. Of the overall computer users in Greece only 20 percent are women."

The sexual educational site that is closer to the standards Genders Relations aims to meet is Britain's www.avert.org designed to teach children about Aids and contraception. "The site is effective because it is accessible, interactive and encourages users to think. At the same time objective truths are presented matter-of-factly, backed by evidence."