New Blood Entry — On It

1 in 4 girls feel unprepared when starting their periods. In the U.K., a number of factors lead to the stigmatisation of periods with the key factor being lack of consistent, informative and appropriate education. Further accentuating the issue, menstrual education isn’t currently compulsory in the U.K and isn’t scheduled to be until 2020. There is no structure to guide the development of an appropriate curriculum which results in non-standard period education, with large discrepancies between schools and regions, leading to further misunderstanding amongst children.
The founding principle of this project is to create a cheap, accessible learning resource for schools to help teach children from 7-12 years about menstruation. Key issues with this are gaining school board approval and access to schools in order to develop a deeper understanding about the problem and stakeholders involved.
We have established several working relationships with schools and parents enabling us to gain detailed insights into the problem and test a variety of prototypes. Brain writing techniques and design methodologies were used to iterative concepts. Ideas were tested via questionnaires and conversations with teachers, parents and students.
On It is a period education card game for use in classrooms, communities and homes to create and open a dialogue to destigmatize menstruation amongst children at a young age. All girls that we have tested the card deck with so far have learnt something new about periods and we have had considerable interest from parents and teachers.