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Please read the Prezi presentation first

Don't text and drive. Don't drink and drive. Use the crossing.

These are the road safety messages that are most "pressed" upon us teens of today. But what about the 16 year old who died due to not being aware of his surroundings as a result of using headphones (2)? Or in 2016, at our school, when a girl was nearly hit by a car when crossing the road, wearing headphones, and being on her phone?

Throughout the last few years, technology has evolved immensely and has been successfully applied to our lives making the world more accessible and efficient. However, the increasing use of devices for the future is posing as a threat to everyone on the road. One of the most common yet but least known is “distracted walking”. Distracted walking has become much more common over the last few years with the increasing use of smartphones. With 90% of New Zealanders expected to own a smartphone by 2018 (1), distracted walking poses as a huge threat to the future of New Zealand transport. Distracted walking, especially related to the use of smartphones (texting, calling, listening to music), decrease the pedestrian’s awareness of their surroundings, resulting in an increased risk of getting into an accident.

It is an issue which we believe is incredibly prevalent around us and will get worse for the future. However, hardly any awareness is being created about "distracted walking". It is unfortunate that distracted walking is being overlooked as it is considered a lower risk than distracted driving, despite being more common, especially within students.

We want the future transport of New Zealand to be first and foremost SAFE. With the more technology to come in the future, more awareness need to be made to make sure these devices that make our lives easier, do not take our lives away.

As part of our development process, we shared our website and game to two junior (Year 9 and 10) classes. We amassed just under 50 responses to our survey which can be viewed under the "Revise" tab on our website. From this we responded to requests including adding a "Boss" level, and cyclists to the road. We believe this was vital to the design process and making the game representative of what our target market would enjoy and engage with.

Sharing

As mentioned above, our focus audience was the students of our school- Westlake Girls High School. We are positioned right next to a bus station and a 4-way intersection, so we are constantly exposed to busy traffic. However, it is the unfortunate reality that high school students tend to forget and ignore road safety. That is why we believed this competition was the perfect opportunity to remind high school students of the risks they are putting themselves into. Hence, our mission was not to lecture students, but rather promote and remind them of the risks of distracted walking.

We wanted to portray our message in a short and succinct manner for teenage high schoolers. Hence, we made a simple game (quick to play) that could be played by any of the students in our school (online game as BYOD is compulsory) and was easily accessible (on a website)

Firstly, we emailed the link for our website to the whole school. To increase engagement with our project, we asked people to reply to the email with a screenshot of their high score- incentivising the winner with a chocolate bar! To promote the email, we spoke in assemblies and went around form classes at Westlake Girls High School.

We also turned our research into a Prezi- it is much more interactive and we believe that teenagers are more likely to flick through it, than reading all of our research! The Prezi and game have all been put onto our website.

References
http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/press-release.pag?docid=288249825
http://www.police.govt.nz/news/release/16-year-old-boy-killed-accident-ranui-train-station