There are many injuries in traffic happening everyday in Turkey due to the lack of helmet usage and unconsciousness. Our goal was to increase the awareness of helmet usage and to help people with acknowledging the high risk that they are putting their lives into.
The ideas
Before starting the project, we observed that many people in our city don't often use helmets in traffic. The first spark of idea of ours was to take action. Therefore, we started making further observations and we created a survey. We wanted to confirm if our observations were true by analyzing the survey we conducted with the help of Google forms in three categories: according to the participant’s ages, education levels and cities they live in. This allowed us to compare the responses we received. For instance, we could say that people who live in Kars (a city in Turkey) generally use helmets more in traffic than the people who live in Erzurum (another city in Turkey). Our survey received 228 responses in total, we didn’t have any specifically targeted audience, but as we kept getting responses, we could see that most of the participants were at the age of 15-17.
Our motto was to identify the problem ourselves, and then help others see the problem, as well. According to our Google survey, we observed that, generally, people do not use helmets while doing activities that require wearing a helmet. The pie graphics were shared on Instagram on an account that was particularly created for the survey analysis, and the survey participants were encouraged to check the Instagram account out. In conclusion, we helped people who have taken the survey with pointing out their mistakes, and being aware of the risk they are taking by not wearing helmets in traffic.
The initiatives
We decided to raise awareness of helmet usage around Turkey, particularly Erzurum. We mostly targeted our peers (15-16), but we still did not exclude elders or people who are younger than us.
We created different materials. We made a poster that was shared on our Instagram page, we held a Zoom meeting with 16 elementary school students to inform them about helmets with the help of a Powerpoint presentation that was prepared for the Zoom meeting, the presentation included many titles, such as ‘No bullying’ to ensure that students would not make fun of their friends who wear helmets, ‘When will helmets be used?’ tilte was also included in our presentation to teach them that helmets should also be worn while doing certain sports. The presentation was immeadiately followed by a taboo game about helmet usage to keep the meeting active, including words that are related to the topics we presented.
We used different online platforms for our materials, Google Slides, Google Forms, Zoom, WhatsApp, Webmail, Instagram. The materials that we prepared had different audiences but they were all linked to the topic of helmet usage.
We have been through a great experience, always keeping in mind that we were helping people be safe. This thought always motivated us during the challenging phases of our project.
