This project will consist of the development of new resources for teaching primary school children (aged 10-12) about why we need trials and how trials work, with a view to being more widely used throughout the trial community. These resources will align with the START (Schools Teaching Awareness of Randomised Trials) Competition, which challenges primary school children (aged 10-12) to simulate and report their very own randomised trial or fair test of claims.
This project will work in partnership with primary school children, and these resources will be developed with ongoing input and ideas from children to suit the Irish school context. The team will work with designers in developing suitable material appealing to Irish children. The children will contribute substantially to all stages in the processes of development of the resources. The outputs of this project will not only reflect peer-led learning within this age group, but also be more widely accessible by other groups of people.
The first step of this project will be to establish what resources should be developed, this may include animated videos or posters or podcasts and will be developed with primary school children, to help explain these concepts to children. These newly developed resources will be used by schools for the START competition but can also be used more generally, in a fun and appealing way, to explain difficult trial concepts across all ages and cohorts for example for members of the public considering joining a randomised trial.
