To this day, sexual education is challenged in the Danish school system. Earlier we found that talking about gender, body and sexuality continues to embarrass both children and grown- ups, and that it may be difficult for teachers to prioritize this subject. Concluding this, but still having a soft spot for the subject, we decided to look into how we could create something outside of the school system to help children and teenagers to find more knowledge about gender, body and sexuality.
Doing this, we want to explore how different digital platforms support participatory culture. We decided to focus on participatory culture, since we wanted to create something where users feel included and want to participate in creating value. We analysed three different social media platforms (Instagram, Youtube and Facebook) to find which one would be best at hosting such a concept. We investigated this with a special focus on how children aged 13-17 can become active participants in the guidance and teaching of gender, body and sexuality. Based on the results, we developed a concept to help provide the framework to support Participatory Culture. The analysis was made due to theories such as motivation, experience, participatory culture, the Honeycomb-model, aesthetics and user experience. Due to Corona-virus we were not able to make the kind of investigations we had planned, including interviewing children. Therefore we used our own experiences with the different social media platforms. Due to Corona-virus we ourselves discovered how social media was all of a sudden our primary contact with the world, and we found new communities online. This was something to be used in our project, as it was obvious that social media had a unique perspective on Participatory Culture. Therefore we used autoethnography as a method for understanding our own relationship with social media and how we participate actively.
From the findings in our analysis and knowledge from our previous report Make Sex Ed Great Again (Bartholomæussen et al., 2018), we were able to choose one social media platform to host our concept and the first steps in making a prototype. Throughout our entire project we have been using the concepts of Design Thinking, and our project is based on a divergent and convergent method for making the best possible design. At the end of our project we decided to work out a prototype, which will be tested after the delivery of the project and the results will be presented in the oral exam.