Development of Hypermedia for Smoking Prevention

The project's long-term goal is to reduce adolescent smoking through development of interactive multimedia, an intervention that holds promise for being effective with those students considered "hard to reach" by traditional classroom methods and who comprise a large percentage of adolescent smokers. The specific aims of the Phase I project are to develop a prototype of an interactive multimedia module on tobacco prevention, to evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of the prototype, particularly its ability to reach "high risk" students based on feedback from middle school students, and to examine the feasibility of expanding the prototype for Phase II development. The prototype will consist of a hypermedia stack on high-priority topic(s), identified through a review of effective tobacco prevention curricula. It will be evaluated through observation and focus groups with students. The product is technologically innovative because it uses a new computer-based learning strategy to extend the effectiveness of proven curricula. It is commercially applicable because schools are rapidly expanding their hardware capacity to use interactive multimedia, but a variety of software in health education is not yet in place.