Skip to main content.
OSUN
  • Education sub-menuEducation

    With a strong emphasis on student-centered learning, critical literacy, and liberal arts and sciences education, OSUN creates diverse global classrooms of students who learn from each other and collectively develop a culture of dialogue and debate.

    • Teaching
      • Birkbeck Summer School
      • Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy (CLASP)
      • Developing Teaching Professionals
      • Global History Lab
      • Global Teaching Fellowship Program
      • GLOBALED
      • Hannah Arendt Humanities Network
      • Network Collaborative Courses
      • OSUN Courses
    • Threatened Scholars
      Initiative

    • Mobility

    • Certificate Programs
    • Curricula
      • CORUSUS
      • Economic Democracy Initiative
      • Economic Policy Addressing Inequality and Poverty
      • Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network
      • Human Rights Program
      • Liberal Arts and Sciences Collaborative
      • Policy Labs
      • Professional Development Program for University Administrators
      • Public Health and Human Rights
      • Strengthening the Core
      • Transnational Politics
      • Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice
  • Research sub-menuResearch

    OSUN promotes collaboration across its partner institutions, including the codesign of research projects, to explore issues of global and local relevance through socially engaged research, interdisciplinary collaboration, or comparative research.

    • Research Projects
      • The Democracy Institute
      • Economic Democracy Initiative
      • Engaged Scholarship
      • GEOHUB
      • Global Institute of Advanced Study
      • Global Observatory on Academic Freedom
      • Interruptrr
      • Open Society Research Platform
      • Research Creation Initiative
      • Senior Projects
    • Fellowships
      • Chatham House Academy Fellowships
      • Global Scholars Academy
      • Modular Doctoral Program
  • Access sub-menuAccess

    OSUN expands access to higher education by creating new pathways for underserved communities. Academic integration and connected learning bring educational opportunities to students beyond OSUN’s brick-and-mortar campuses.

    • Teacher Education
      • Enhanced Network Teacher Education Capacity
      • Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives
    • Education Pathways
      • Collaborative for Liberal Education for Adolescents
      • Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison
      • English Learner Success in Content Classrooms
      • Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives
      • Microcollege for Just Community Leadership
      • OLIve
      • Roma Equity in Higher Education
      • The Socrates Project
  • Civic sub-menuCivic Engagement

    With a belief in the public purpose of higher education, civic engagement across OSUN promotes best practices and bold new initiatives to help students, faculty, and institutions realize their full potential as community actors and educators.

    • Student Engagement
      • Global Commons
      • Global Debate Network
      • Global Engagement Fellows
      • Get Engaged Conference
      • Online Arts Workshop
      • Student-Led Initiatives
      • Student Life Initiatives Project (SLIP)
    • Engaged Learning
      • Certificate in Civic Engagement
      • Community Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences
      • Engaged Scholarship
      • Engaged Senior Projects
      • OSUN Science Shop
      • Solve Climate by 2030
  • News sub-menuNews + Opportunities

    OSUN offers myriad opportunities and events to undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and scholars, and faculty. News and features provide updates on project impacts and the people involved.

    • Newsroom
      • Current News         
      • News Archive
    • Events
      • Current Events
      • Events Archive
    • Opportunities
      • Current Opportunities
      • Student Opportunities
      • Faculty Opportunities
      • Opportunities Archive
  • Resources sub-menuResources

    OSUN faculty and institutions have worked collectively to assemble this dynamic collection of student-centered teaching methodologies and instructional strategies. Whether working online, in person, or in a blended context, establishing a clear and consistent communication plan with students is central to all of these practices.

    • OSUN Resources
      • Academic Technology Guides
      • Blended Learning Toolkit
  • About sub-menuAbout

    OSUN aims to educate students for tomorrow’s global challenges, fostering critical thinking and open intellectual inquiry to strengthen the foundations of open society amid the current authoritarian resurgence.

    • About OSUN
      • Our Vision
      • Who We Are
      • What We Do
      • Member Institutions
      • Themes
      • Annual Report
  • Search
News & Events Menu
  • Newsroom
    • Current News
    • News Archive
  • Events
    • Current Events
    • Events Archive
  • Opportunities
    • Current Opportunities
    • Opportunities Archive

OSUN News

View all news

"Not a Shame": OSUN Students Developing Online Game to Destigmatize Sex Education for Global Teens

Alua Samat and other students at AUCA and Bard College developed the Not A Shame online game as part of the OSUN course "Social Entrepreneurship."
A version of this article was originally published on the Lead the Change blog

By Eban Goodstein


Alua Samat is a student at Bard College and a sex education activist. In her home country of Kazakhstan, young people, and especially girls, have few reliable sources of information about their sexuality. They learn from whatever inadequate sources they can find, including the distorted world of on-line porn. As a result, teen pregnancy is more than six times higher in Central Asia than in developed countries.

Samat has been working with others for years to overcome the stigma that accompanies education about human sexuality for and among teens. While enrolled in OSUN's Network Collaborative Course on Social Entrepreneurship, she teamed up with four other passionate students from Bard and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA), both OSUN partner institutions, to create what could be the answer: an online game called Not a Shame. Their effort, currently under development, is being designed as a potential resource for teenagers across the globe.

Stigma and Language Barriers: One Scenario 

The Not a Shame team has created the following scenario to illustrate challenges some young people face when dealing with teen pregnancy:

Alexandra, 15 years old, is a high school student in a Central Asian country. Recently, she found out her friend was pregnant. Both Alexandra and her friend are scared and in panic; Alexandra started Googling information on what to do in this situation.

Given how stigmatized pregnancy outside of marriage is in the region, especially when it comes to teenagers, it was unsafe for her friend to tell anyone. One other concern was abortion: they heard such an option existed, but did not know where to go. One suggestion was to take a pill that would terminate the pregnancy on its own but where would they buy it?

The two teens also had no idea what to do if the friend decided to continue the pregnancy and eventually give birth: all the available information was in Russian, but the only language they felt confident in was Kyrgyz.  Asking parents was not an option either; they would become too suspicious of Alexandra hiding something. And she did not want to spill her friend's secret to her own parents.

That night Alexandra was unable to fall asleep because of all the overwhelming feelings and stress. Scrolling on her phone, she saw an advertisement for Not a Shame, which seemed to be telling the same story of what she and her friend were going through. Alexandra always loved diving into other lives and standing in other characters' shoes in mobile games, so she got intrigued and clicked Install to see if the story had anything she could apply to her life. 


Existing sex education games are popular among teens around the world, but are not accessible to the many communities who do not speak English, Russian, or other global languages. The games can also fail to recognize different cultural nuances around sexual education and family planning. For example, in some countries condoms purchased from grocery stores frequently aren't as safe, as the products are often expired, notes the team.

The Not a Shame game could help to close such gaps, not only in Central Asian countries but potentially all over the world by serving teens in their own languages and adapting storylines and curricula to fit culture-specific, local needs. The platform would offer a free version of the game with paid tiers and sponsored ads.

The Power of a Global Classroom

Not A Shame emerged from a fall 2022 OSUN Network Collaborative Course on "Social Entrepreneurship," part of a three-course Global Certificate in Social Enterprise and Leading Change offered through Bard’s MBA in Sustainability and the Open Society University Network.

The course brought together students and faculty from AUCA in Kyrgyzstan, Bard College in New York, BRAC University in Bangladesh, Al Quds University in Palestine, the American University of Bulgaria, Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, and others. Students gathered weekly in an international zoom meeting conducted by instructors across seven OSUN campuses, and then met in person with local co-instructors who helped develop their projects. 

Developing, Pitching, and Launching the Platform

Samat’s team was selected as one of the top three participants from the global group represented in the OSUN virtual class. In December 2022, the team participated in Bard MBA’s annual pitch competition and it was announced that they would receive a $1,500 prize to help them develop the business. 

Samat notes that the global class meetings and local sessions gave her team the valuable opportunity to practice presenting the project. When she later pitched the project to a panel of high-level judges in New York, she said that  “thanks to that classroom experience, I was personally not puzzled by the questions the judges asked, nor did I feel nervous.”

Bermet Suiutbekova, the team’s faculty instructor at AUCA said that Not a Shame “will bring a positive change to Central Asian countries. With the help of $1,500 in prize money from the competition, the team is planning to release the beta version of the product in June of 2023 and go to market in July of 2024.” Together, this team of young people from opposite sides of the world could very well make a difference in the lives of young people worldwide.

Post Date: 01-31-2023
Open Society University Network
For more information contact: 
[email protected]