EJEL Volume 6 Issue 2
April 2008
e – Motional Learning in Primary Schools: FearNot! an Anti-bullying Intervention Based on Virtual Role-play with Intelligent Synthetic Characters
Sibylle Enz1, Carsten Zoll1, Natalie Vannini2, Wolfgang Schneider2, Lynne Hall3, Ana Paiva4 and Ruth Aylett5
1Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Psychologie, Otto-Friedrich Universität, Bamberg, Germany
2Lehrstuhl für Pädagogische Psychologie, Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg, Germany
3School of Computing & Technology, University of Sunderland, UK
4Instituto Superior Tecnico and INESC-ID Lisbon, Portugal
5MACS, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, UK
Educational role-play is widely accepted as a powerful instrument to change attitudes and behaviour, but faces some difficulties and disadvantages when applied to sensitive social issues in the classroom. This paper shows how the FearNot! software application uses virtual role-play and autonomous agents to provide children aged eight to eleven years of age with the opportunity to visit a virtual school environment populated by 3D animated synthetic characters that engage in bullying episodes.
The characters’ actions and the storyline are created as improvised dramas by use of emergent narrative, resulting in unscripted and highly believable interaction experiences for the learner. While the students are spectators to the bullying episodes that unfold among the FearNot! characters, the victimised character starts a conversation with the student in between the episodes, describing their experiences with bullying and how they feel as a result to it, and asking the student for advice. The aim of this highly innovative pedagogical approach is to sensitise primary school students for the potential problems that victims of persistent aggressive behaviour are facing: By triggering an empathic relationship between learners and characters, learners understand and vicariously feel into the plight of the victimised character. Bystanders are thus no longer reinforcers by turning their attention to bullying incidents, but become active to help the victim, as a consequence of their heightened awareness and sensitivity to the grave consequences victims face.
Preliminary evaluation results indicate that the children were willing to immerse themselves in the virtual drama and that they empathically engage with the characters, attributing a range of emotions to the characters depending on the events that happen within the respective scenario. An ongoing long-term intervention in school in the UK and Germany covers several interactions with the software over a ten week period of time.
Keywords:
virtual environment, social and emotional learning, synthetic characters, bullying
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