A Comparative Analysis of Gamified and Non-gamified Interventions' Effectiveness in Teaching Adolescent Students About Healthy Sexual Practices in Tanzania

Introduction This study primarily evaluated the effectiveness of gamified learning particularly serious game and gamification platforms aimed to improve sexual health education in a resource-limited setting of Tanzania. The need for the study arose because many adolescent students have little knowledge on sexual and reproductive health, which makes them vulnerable to engaging in unhealthy and high-risk sexual practices, hence prompting global public health researchers to find innovative approaches to addressing the problem. Methods The study applied a participatory research design that involved active users and other key stakeholders in developing the "My Future Begins Today" digital game. A quasi-experiment-controlled study enabled the use of two gamified learning conditions-serious game and gamification platforms-with a traditional non-gamified teaching method) serving as control. In all, 108 students aged 11-15 drawn from one secondary school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, participated in a series of sexual health education. The age mean of participants was 13, whereby males were 61 (56.5%) and females were 47 (43.5%). Results: Overall, the gamified learning students demonstrated a significant improvement in knowledge acquisition and change of attitude on all five topics of sexual health education than the non-gamified students: F (2, 105) = 71.866, p < .001). Moreover, the gamified students perceived more positively over the whole MAKE evaluation than the non-gamified students (p < .001). Conclusion The study found that gamified systems can effectively reduce risky sexual behaviours and improve health outcomes by providing meaningful knowledge through activities, competitions, awards, and leaderboards, which are otherwise unavailable in non-gamified classes. Policy Implications Innovative teaching strategies like gamified learning can help decision-makers and policymakers create guidelines and regulations that improve services for adolescents' sexual and reproductive health. Thus, this study has demonstrated how gamified can impact teenagers' sexual behaviour decision-making and support cognitive development.