Digital Participation
Our work towards making the best use of digital technologies to enable children and young people across Highland to create, collaborate, communicate, and have their voices heard where and when they wish.
Digital Design Project
This project was a partnership project between Inspiring Young Voices the University of the Highlands and Islands and Day1 Mentoring, funded by Alliance Scotland’s Self-Management fund.
The first phase of project was co-developed with young people when a previous digital wellbeing tool for children and young people, the Interactive My World Triangle (developed by Highland Children’s Forum in 2008) would no longer operate with modern browsers. There was recognition that young people were now the experts in their use of digital platforms and that involving them in the design of any digital approaches to supporting wellbeing would be necessary.
The project sought to co-develop digital solutions with young people with additional support needs, or those who were experiencing long term challenges in their lives, working through the “LEAP”* three phases of participation:
- Learning: what digital platforms young people already used; how they used them and how they might use digital platforms to improve wellbeing and deal with the challenges they faced.
- Evaluate: offering young people examples of digital platforms developed in response to the learning phase of participation and seeking their evaluation to continue digital developments.
- Planning: bring the developing platforms to young people and seek their ideas about how to take the development to the next stage of iteration.
Throughout this first stage, the project was responsive to the input from young people. The phase one final participation event took place on 29th October 2021 and the report can be read here.
Next steps: Mentorship in Virtual Reality
Our work to develop digital engagement with children and young people is continuing, and we are moving to the next stage of development of the digital project, which involves co-designing with young people a digital mode of support that would promote wellbeing and a sense of having a safe space at home via access to mentorship and peer-support. This next stage will take the form of a pilot- with volunteer mentors and volunteer mentees, meeting in VR for regular mentoring sessions. The young people will directly contribute ideas and thoughts for how they think mentoring in VR should work and they will collaborate in the exploration of various VR apps. We have been generously supported in our VR work with children and young people by our friends at Foróige. IYV staff have attended their trainings in using AltspaceVR, Rec-Room and most recently Gravity Sketch. We are grateful for the support of Foróige.