Developing Multimedia Enhanced Content to Raise HIV/AIDS Awareness to Children

Abstract

It is estimated that more than two-thirds (70%) of all the 35 million people living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Tanzania as one of the country in sub-Sahara region is no exceptional, more than 60% of all new HIV infections in Tanzania occur among young people. While almost all children in Tanzania aged 15 years and below have heard about HIV/AIDS, less than half have enough knowledge to protect themselves against infections. It is known that HIV/AIDS is taught in primary schools, although majority of the pupils demonstrated a very low level of knowledge about HIV/AIDS. This raised a concern on the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS and life skills education in primary schools. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a great potential for HIV/AIDS education to children because they like and enjoy to use ICT resources for entertainment, learning, networking and communication. Hence, it is important to apply technology for educational in teaching HIV/AIDS through the use of multimedia contents in accordance to the local context of Tanzanian curriculum for primary schools. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to develop multimedia enhanced contents to raise HIV/AIDS awareness to children. ADDIE model, Adobe Flash Professional 5, Action Script programming language and articulate storyline2 authoring tool, were used in the development of multimedia enhanced contents. Results show that level of HIV/AIDS knowledge among pupils after using the interactive multimedia has been enhanced in the tested three knowledge areas (causes, prevention and effects). Results in this paper suggest that, multimedia enhanced contents can be used to complement text book based learning approach in enhancing HIV/AIDS awareness for children in primary schools in Tanzania.