When developing interventions and policies for children, decisions are often made without considering the perspectives of the children themselves. To develop effective and engaging interventions, it is important to make children's voices heard by allowing them to actively participate, discuss and decide in the development process. Therefore, we have started our"Let's Movez Together" Healthy Start Sprint project. In this project, we will develop a tool that supports meaningful participation and involvement of children in designing, developing and implementing interventions and policies regarding children’s (digital) resilience. 

Educational and fun for children, useful for professionals 

To ensure the tool is meaningful and engaging for children, we aim to develop a tool that allows them to develop their talents, skills and competences in a fun way. When using the tool, we want them to experience a sense of safety, control and empowerment. At the same time, the tool will make meaningful child participation easier and more accessible to researchers and professionals.  

Let's Movez Together! 

Over the next year, we will show you the development process of this tool and how we design prototypes with children, researchers and professionals. To do this in the best way possible, we have joined forces with Healthy Start partner Bianca Boender (You!nG), with her great passion for and extensive experience in developing creative tools for meaningful participation of children and young people. We also collaborate with Frank van Lenthe and Famke Mölenberg of Erasmus MC, with expertise in prevention and intervention in the fields of youth health and citizen science. From our own Movez Lab, Esther Rozendaal, Chiara de Jong, and Kim Doornhein will be most actively involved in this project.  

Digital resilience interventions 

Over the course of the year, within the MediaMovez project, we will apply the tool's prototypes in the context of our digital resilience research with pre-adolescents. Within this research we have already gained more insight into the opportunities and challenges of pre-adolescents' online worlds and the strategies they (need to) apply to thrive in this world. With this new tool, we build further on our participatory research and allow children to not only co-define their online world, but also to co-design interventions aimed at boosting their digital resilience. To ensure the wide and correct implementation of our tool, Bianca Boender will develop a training for professionals looking to co-design interventions with pre-adolescents.  

Looking forward to the rest of this project? Stay tuned!