No Shame in Menstruation
Qi Wang, Jiakun Yang & Yifan Yao
Menstruation education in Chinese secondary schools is limited, often treated as a sensitive topic that leads to misunderstanding and shame among adolescents. Collaborating with Grade 8 biology teachers at Shanghai Wuxun Secondary School, this project adopts the CREDIBLE framework to design classroom materials that normalize menstrual knowledge and foster healthy gender awareness. The materials include a lesson plan, a diagnostic flowchart, and an interactive “Period Journey” board game that gamifies key biological concepts while promoting communication, emotional support, and peer cooperation. Drawing on literature about menstrual shame, life-oriented biology teaching, and process-based evaluation, the project integrates gamification and multimodal learning to help students externalize their thinking, reduce embarrassment, and engage meaningfully with physiological knowledge. The materials were piloted in a Grade 8 classroom, where teachers reported strong student engagement, improved participation, and reduced discomfort typically associated with menstruation-related discussions. Feedback also highlighted the value of contextualized introductions, progressive difficulty design, and opportunities for students to co-construct questions. Overall, the project shows that game-based, dialogic, and life-relevant materials can effectively reduce menstrual shame and enhance adolescents’ scientific understanding of this normal physiological process.