Hey all! Our final major milestone for October was pilot testing Chit Chat’s education resources at Epping Secondary College. Receiving feedback from students is an incredibly valuable step in the project’s process. Getting the input from these students gives us an insight into what they find engaging and useful and most importantly, if they would actually use the resources if they were looking for information and support on the issues.

It was an enlightening process – what we assumed would be engaging was not necessarily the case for the students.

We worked with a great group of roughly 20 students from year 9 and 10. We broke off into two groups, with year 10s looking over the resources for Who Stole the Sole and year 9s going through the Love Drunk resources. The aim of testing the resources with students was to find out what features they liked and whether the information was useful and engaging. But most of all, we needed to find out whether or not they would use these resources themselves.

For the most part, the students liked the resources that we collected for both Love Drunk and Who Stole the Sole. But it was clear from discussions that they loved resources that were interactive and preferred information to be presented in videos. If it was presented as an article, the majority of the students just scrolled through it without reading it through. But if they were personally interested in a topic, then the chances of the article being read increased somewhat.

Surprisingly, a lot of the students preferred the ‘science-y’ content, something that we assumed would bore the students. It was also interesting to see the differences between the two groups, even though the students were only a year apart in age. The older students in Who Stole the Sole felt that the ‘Draw the Line’ activities were patronising and felt the message has been repeated to them for years while the Love Drunk group enjoyed the activities and treated them as a ‘refresher’.

Students in the Who Stole the Sole group loved the message from the ‘Bat Story’, while several students in the Love Drunk group were confused by it and preferred the ‘Difference, Differently – Diversity Q&A’ section. At the end of the day, it was great to see that the students themselves recognised that accepting and celebrating difference was an important issue for teenagers.

They also gave us some great feedback and suggestions for the website!

One issue that kept coming up was that the website was simple and easy to navigate but needed more colour in the teenagers section!

Let us know what you think!