SBIR-STTR Award

To combat the high number of unintentional deaths and injuries sustained by children under age 14 who participate in recreational activities, Electronic Learning Facilitators will create an injury prevention kit to be incorporated into fourth grade health and safety curriculum. The primary goal of this program will be to increase safe recreational behavior among fourth graders. The kit will include a highly interactive, web-based multimedia program that will inform children about injuries associated with recreational activities, and how to prevent them; model safe and unsafe behaviors, allowing children to see the consequences of unsafe actions; and simulate recreational activities, giving children the opportunity to practice making safe decisions. The kit will also include a guide to help teachers incorporate the multimedia program into their larger safety curriculum. It will include lesson objectives and strategies for achieving them; methods for gaining parental support; activities for community involvement; motivational items, such as a poster for the classroom and stickers for the children; and information on how to create/change public policy. The multimedia program will comprise several modules, each pertaining to a different sport or activity. For the Phase I prototype we will complete one module, which will cover bicycling. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: Safe and Fun: An Injury Prevention Kit will be a Web-based, interactive multimedia program for fourth graders designed for distribution through the classroom. The program kit also will include a teacher's guide; activities; motivational items; and ideas for gaining parental and community support, and changing public policy. Individual teachers, schools or school districts will be able to purchase the kit in order to gain access to the supplementary materials. PH5 6246-1 (Rev. 1198) Page 2

Public Health Relevance:
This Public Health Relevance is not available.

Thesaurus Terms:
Adolescence (12-18), Behavior Modification, Computer System Design /Evaluation, Health Behavior, Injury Prevention, Interactive Multimedia, Recreation, Safety Equipment Dvd /Cd Rom, Internet, Child Behavior, Computer Program /Software Behavioral /Social Science Research Tag, Human Subject, Interview

In the fourth grade children are just entering bicycling's "danger age" of 10 to 14 years old. Between 1992 and 1995, an average of 143 10 to 14 year olds died annually from bicycling related injuries. Other "wheel" activities, such as skateboarding, in-line skating, scooters and skateboarding also have been shown to cause injury and even death. The primary goal of the program, Safe and Fun: A Prevention Kit is to increase safe wheel recreational behavior among fourth graders. To reach this goal, the primary objectives of the program Safe ant Fun: A Prevention Kit are to teach fourth graders: 1.) how injuries are caused and prevented, 2.) how to differentiate between safe and unsafe behavior, 3.) how to make safe and informed decisions and 4.) how to make a difference' related to safety issues. The Global Learning Systems (GLS) product fills a gap in elementary school wheel safety education by providing a relatively low cost, rigorously field-tested, comprehensive and simulated program--a safe and fun place-- for learning and practice to occur, thereby increasing chances of learning new skills and information about the activities enjoyed by 8-10 years olds while decreasing the potential health risks, time and money spent in hospital emergency rooms. Owing to the success of Phase I, GLS will expand upon the interactive, scenario-based, simulative, multimedia-rich prototype CD-ROM prevention strategy it designed, developed and evaluated in Phase I and expand it to a blended solution to include, CD-RQM, the Web and print materials for in-class learning and family involvement. The field test design will be a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with two post-tests---the second post-test will be administered three months after the first. The testing will include two sets of schools, matched by cultural and socio-economic characteristics. Half of the students, or two schools, will be randomly assigned to either the GLS blended solution or to a more conventional (print-based materials) recreational wheel safety program. The program's feasibility will be based on relevant measures of participant knowledge of the content, changes in behavior and attitudes, and self-efficacy. Based upon the outcomes of the Phase II evaluation the product will be revised for marketing to elementary schools, other educational and/or safety organizations targeting eight to 10 year olds and home computer consumers.

Public Health Relevance:
This Public Health Relevance is not available.

Thesaurus Terms:
Dvd /Cd Rom, Internet, Educational Resource Design /Development, Handbook, Health Education, Injury Prevention, Middle Childhood (6-11), Transportation /Recreation Safety Decision Making, Elementary School, Health Behavior, Self Concept Clinical Research, Human Subject