Description:
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.