Life Secrets
Digital Children’s Book (App) for Children Sex Education
Self-Initiated Project
Recognition
Digital Ehon Award
Winner 2019 | Digital children’s book award
Research
In Japan no one wants to talk about sex education.
“Mom, where do I come from?” “Dad, why Mary doesn’t live with her parents?” Many children inevitably like asking these questions as early as the preschool years. It is a kid's nature to be curious about others who are different from their own, but these questions usually make their parents embarrassed and don’t know how to respond in an appropriate way.
Hopefully, Secret Life, a digital book drawn, written and designed with warmth and honesty, shows clear information for those children who are becoming aware of their bodies, but aren‘t ready to learn about sexual intercourse. It tells children life stories through three chapters, which are Parents Secret, Amazing Yourself and Love Is Love. After reading the whole book, children could acquire age-appropriate information about reproduction, birth, genders, self-protection and different types of family structure they may meet in kindergarten. It aims to educate and encourage children to treat someone in an equal way if he or she is different from their own, and also, make children could understand and respect other’s diversity and preference.
Chia-kuan Chen, Weijie Wang, and Yaohan Gu designed this didactic digital book in a light-hearted and playful ways so that parents will gladly share with young ones. The interesting interactions in Secret Life will attract children keep exploring by themselves or with parents and learning knowledge while playing.
How To Use
Education App
(Interactive Digital Picture Book)
It has digital version and physical version.
For the digital book, you could download it from App store (launching soon). It has entire story and clear contents. When children choose each chapter, all they need to do is following the sign, and finally they could read entire story with laugh and happiness.
Besides, except for the main story line, there are numerous interesting detail interactions in this app, they could explore by themselves.
Physical Book
For physical book, they could buy it from book store and read it with their parents.
Concept Development & Prototyping
Fieldwork & Testing
We hold workshops with kids and teachers in kindergartens in Japan and China.
We are trying to hold as many workshops as we can, in order to get more valuable user feedbacks from kids, parents and teachers.
Selling Point:
Have you ever considered talking about sex-related topic to your child when he or she asked you how was she born? Most likely not. Sex-related topics has always been a taboo in many different cultural contexts. Although it is widely acknowledged that adequate sexual education is vital to a child’s coming to adolescent, parents are still hesitant to talk about such topics. They are either worried about the likelihood to embarrass themselves with the “inappropriate contents”, or simply don’t know where to start.
To deal with this issue, we present “Life Secrets”, an interactive digital book which gives children the opportunity to explore sexuality. The stories in the book not only teach them to respect and protect their own sexual identity, but also touch on important issues such as sexual diversity and family structures. We want to empower our little readers to be aware of who they are, how they were born, and why differences aren’t necessarily bad.
Having done the user research in Japan, the UK and USA, we designed the book with the vision of making it universally effective. Adopting a human-centered approach in the design process, we focused on both parents’ experience of teaching their children with the book, as well as the children’s experience interacting with the book. With the cartoon-style motion graphics, the fun interactions, the intuitive narrations and the meaningful storyline, the book not only minimizes parents’ concern in the appropriateness of teaching children about sexuality, but also let children enjoy the process of learning it.
Design
Age-appropriate sexual educational story
Clear, accurate information that's age-appropriate is essential when you decide to use a book to help you discuss puberty and sex with your children.
Before You Were Born:
The Inside Story
Imagine what your life was like before you were born. What did you hear? How did you eat? What did you do to keep busy? It explores the beginning of life from a new perspective. Young readers are taken on a fascinating journey to see where they all began.
Who Has What?
With charming, informative words and pictures, this book will reassure children that whether they have a girl’s body or a boy’s body, their bodies are truly amazing – and totally wonderful!
Teach children body safety
The crucial skills taught in this chapter will help children to protect their bodies from inappropriate touch. Through age-appropriate illustrations and engaging interaction this digital book, created by us 'No Means No!' and 'Some Secrets Should Never Be Kept', will teach children the following crucial and empowering skills in personal body safety
It’s Okay to Be Different
It inspires kids to celebrate their individuality through acceptance of others and self-confidence. It lets kids know that it’s okay to be a different color, come from a different place, be proud of yourself, and have different kinds of friends. It teaches them to not prejudge others, to tolerate difference and show respect for others and for themselves.
Augmented reality
The Chapter Three uses Augmented Reality to add interactivity to learning experience. It will open additional ways and methods of learning for children. When held in upright position, the iPad becomes a sort of window into the story world, where children can be immersed and move around 360′.
Want to try our APP ?
Please contact me for more details
Meet The Team
Weijie Wang
Designer
Pratt Institute
Yaohan Gu
Designer
Royal College of Art &
Imperial college of London
Chia-kuan Chen
Designer
Keio University Graduate School of Media Design