This is a tobacco education game about the tobacco industry. It is designed to be used in schools with 11 to 14 year olds as the main target audience although adults usually ind it interesting and younger children might get benefit from it.
It has been produced by Healthwise, a Liverpool (UK) based health information service.
The game is designed to be used together with printed support materials for teachers. These materials are also being piloted at the same time. This version has all the features of the full game but only two of the six "quests" are enabled. Please feel free to pass this game around but the 'price' for your free use of this version is feedback to the authors on your thoughts about the game. In particular we want to know what young people think about the game. Did they enjoy it ? What if anything did they learn from it? Please send this feedback to :
Tobacco Quest
James Kay
Healthwise
9 Slater Street
Liverpool L1 4BW
0151 707 2262
0151 708 9984 fax
100565.565@compuserve.com (email)
If you would like to order a full copy of the game please fax or email to James at the above address. A final version should be available soon. We have not fixed the price yet but it will be in region of ú50 per unit including suppoort materials.
Some brief comments about the educational rationale are below.
This program attempts to approach the tobacco issue from a slightly different perspective. Most tobacco education takes an individualising approach - don't smoke because its bad for you - be your own person - resist peer pressure - build your self esteem - improve your decision making skills etc. etc. We don't believe that these approaches are very effective with the more rebellious young person.
Instead we link the harms from tobacco at a group, social and environmental level to the active promotion by the tobacco industry of their product towards young people. We try to create a learning environment from which young people will draw the understanding that they are being deliberately and cynically targeted - as a market - by the industry.
Our discussions with young people shows us that they are more influenced by this awareness - which tends to make them anti tobacco industry - than by appeals to make them more anti tobacco as such.
We aim to use the program to stimulate local activity by young people to track for example local sales to minors and local tobacco advertising practices. We think that it is more likely that this approach will generate activity by the groups most at risk - than other approaches tried so far.
What happens next?
This program is just (May 1995) going into a small number of schools in the Cheshire area of the UK (near to Liverpool and Manchester). It will be piloted there for a school term and some focus groups and semi structured interviews undertaken with teachers and pupils by staff from our organisation - Healthwise. The results of this will be fed back into a further development of the program and it is then hoped to find some further funding for a more structured evaluation of the impact of the revised package with new groups of pupils in schools in our area.
Acknowledgement.
This game has been developed by KKOS computers for Healthwise and funded by the North West Regional Health Authority. Support and advice on the educational strategies has come from the Cancer Research Campaign.
For more information contact James Kay at the above address.
May 17th 1995
This program is designed to run on a PC386 or higher using Windows 3.1 or a later version.
The minimum specification is 4 megabytes if free RAM and at least 6.5 Megabytes of free hard disk space.
The graphics will work using only the minimum 16 Windows colors but will look much better in using 256 - now the standard for Windows.
