We created posters, drawings, stories, a film and an educational event in an awareness campaign concerning the road safety problems we identified in our municipality after analyzing the results of the questionnaire and a photo field investigation.
The ideas
We've been developing the stages of this project for months now, and we hope we'll maintain it as a group of various activities within permanently ongoing campaign.
First, we had a couple of group meetings when we went through materials and useful sources available on http://safety-mobility-for-all.com/. Then, we had brainstorming classes regarding identification of the problems we wanted to deal with. That was how we came to conclusion that it would be the best to carry out a survey and a short field investigation in order to spot those issues that are currently the most problematic in our municipality.
We created a questionnaire based on the materials we read, as well as the laws we found on the official website of our government. We decided to conduct a survey among three age groups: elementary school students, high school students and our parents/teachers in order to see how familiar they are with the basic rules in traffic. Also, we chose a couple of photo-reporters to take some photographs that illustrate unsafe behavior of drivers and pedestrians. After analysing all the results of our survey and photo field investigation it was obvious that we should focus on the following problems:
1. the impact of inappropriately parked cars on pedestrians
2. the impact of using mobile phones on the concentration of drivers and passengers (including “hands-free” devices)
3. (not) using safety belts in the front and back seats
Of course, there were some other problems we noticed such as drunk driving, not wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle etc. We decided not to bypass them while conducting our awareness campaign.
After defining the issues we were going to focus our activities on, we had to decide about which actions to take. The ideas were numerous, so we had to reorganize or group into smaller sections:
authors’ group, art group and so-called journalists’ group. Each of these ``clubs`` participated in realizing the campaign goals in accordance with their talents and abilities.
The initiatives
After identifying the most important problems regarding (un)safe traffic participation in our municipality, we had a lot of ideas about how to refer to those issues within an awareness campaign. We divided our group into three ``clubs``: writers’ section, art group and so-called journalists’ group.
1. Our young authors wrote very touching stories inspired by some tragic events, which are caused by using mobile phones, not fastening our seat belts during participation in traffic, running over a street and similar types of risky behaviour.
2. Our artists’ group worked on several aspects of this project such as: taking photos of inappropriate behavior in traffic, making posters and drawings that represent safe and risky behavior in everyday road traffic situations with the emphasis on the issues we had previously identified.
3. The tasks of the journalists’ group were quite demanding. First, we surveyed eight graders, fourth graders (in high school) and our teachers and parents through a questionnaire. The purpose of this questionnaire was to find out how much these three age groups actually know about the rules in traffic. Taking the results into consideration, we made a short movie. Its purpose was to educate (or maybe even just remind) people of what they should/shouldn’t do while in traffic.
4. All the sections presented the work we had done (stories, drawings, posters, survey results and the film) in our school, and asked their school mates to spread the posters all around our municipality. A lot of friends helped. We launched a successful poster campaign. Then we decided to organize an even bigger event.
5. All the students agreed on organizing an educational event in order to raise awareness regarding the problems identified in previous stages. We presented the project on the 28.5.2018. by talking about our work, but we also invited a prominent traffic engineer, Duško Tučić, who gave a lecture about the topic. Our event included musical performance, our presentation, a quiz we created and Tučić’s memorable lecture. ( We attached PPT we used that day to this presentation so you can take a look. Also, you can find the link for prezi presentation of the entire project on this page. It includes Tučić's lecture. )
The event was a success- we got positive feedback from a large audience, and based on the comments and offers to join our future actions in terms of our awareness campaign, we believe we succeeded in conveying our message. We find the work we did especially rewarding because a lot of young people from other schools attended the event, as well as because more than 80 students from our school helped us conducting the poster campaign. Finally, we hope these activities will provide us credibility to ask for support for even greater actions in the near future.
