Choose your own consequence; a study in behaviour change
How blending AI, multiple choice and creativity can help avoid bad outcomes
Danni Teychenne - BWA’s Learning Designer - recently presented at the H5P Melbourne Community Event, where she demonstrated how this interactive platform can help teach behaviour change using the ‘Choose your own adventure’ method. Because choices, as we know, have consequences.
Using a real-life BWA project as an example, Danni showed how creating scenarios with different outcomes is not only engaging, it can help us understand how to avoid poor choices and bad outcomes in real life.
Athletes, integrity and compliance
In 2024, BehaviourWorks Australia collaborated with the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), an independent entity created by World Athletics to investigate corruption within athletics (cheating, especially doping, is a key focus). The AIU’s education offerings are mostly online, but attendance had been dropping, meaning some athletes were missing information that could lead them to accidentally break the rules, which in turn, could mean suspension or even being banned.
BWA held a ‘hackathon’ (a 3-hour brainstorming session) to see what ideas could be generated to help improve athlete engagement online. Interactivity, storytelling and real-life case studies were held to be good strategies to making the education sessions more attractive. Using a combination of AI, H5P, real life scenarios and creativity, Danni came up with a demonstration of how narratives using branching scenarios (choices along the way) can make a point and keep an audience engaged.
Meet Talia
Talia is not real, but she could be. She’s the main character in a scenario about not paying attention to emails and updates about compliance. Each choice made is brought to life by a short AI-generated clip.
Talia sometimes lets things slip, but when it comes to drug testing regimes, you can’t afford to make mistakes. Like not being there at the arranged time.
Which can have serious consequences.
That may need explaining to the authorities.
So that, thankfully, Talia goes on to greater things.
Ready, set – choose!
By creating realistic stories where audiences are forced to make choices (good, neutral and bad), this type of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure lifts the learning from passively receiving information to active participation. With the added bonus of AI video generators (like Kling) bringing the scenarios to life, it becomes a more compelling model for agencies like the AIU to adopt.
Our intentions don’t always match our behaviours, but by applying technology to creativity, we can learn the consequences of our choices (and how to change both).
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