The Educational Effectiveness of a Simulation/Game in Sex Education

Abstract

In this research, the authors examined the educational effectiveness of a game named POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE for sex education by means of an experiment with Japanese high school students. The authors set up a control condition, a contrast condition in which the students watched educational videos, and two game conditions; in one game condition, participants were in the role of their own sex, and in the other, they played the roles of the opposite sex. The results showed that playing the game with an opposite sex role stimulated the students’ understanding about various problems of sexual activity as strongly as watching educational videos and that it was more effective than videos for the students who did not initially appropriately understand these problems. The results also showed that the evaluation of the game itself and the class in which it was used was higher than the case with videos. These results indicate that the game would be effective in sex education; they also suggested that the way to play the game was important since this effect was more strongly found when we changed the students’ sex roles in the game fromtheir actual ones.