Beating the Bullies--Changing Real-World Behaviour Through Virtual Experience
ICT Results (06/22/09)
The European Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction (eCIRCUS) project aims to create virtual worlds with characters that children can interact and empathize with on such a powerful level that it helps them change their own behavior. The project has developed two programs, FearNot! and ORIENT, to give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds that can encourage them to change their thoughts, feelings, and actions. ECIRCUS researchers first focused on helping children who were the victims of bullying by drawing from recent psychological theories that highlight the importance of feelings for changing how people treat each other. The researchers updated the FearNot! computer program, which was developed as part of an earlier European research effort, by expanding and enriching its content, and made the program more open-ended. For example, the researchers gave virtual bullying victims the ability to remember strategies they have tried, which enable the characters to reject approaches that have failed, and ask the children in the same situation to find better solutions. In the second program, ORIENT, three students are equipped with various handheld control devices and sent as a team to save the planet Orient, a virtual planet populated by frog-like aliens called Sprytes. Students must learn about the Sprytes and empathize with them to help them. The purpose of ORIENT is to make players feel alone in an alien culture, and to help them learn to appreciate people who are different.
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