Positive Technology Journal

The project e-Circus (Education through Characters with emotional Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) aims to develop synthetic characters that interact with pupils in a virtual school, to support social and emotional learning in the real classroom. This will be achieved through virtual role-play with synthetic characters that establish credible and empathic relations with the learners.

The project consortium, which is funded under the EU 6th Framework Program, includes researchers from computer science, education and psychology from the UK, Portugal, Italy and Germany. Teachers and pupils will be included in the development of the software as well as a framework for using it in the classroom context. The e-Circus software will be tested in schools in the UK and Germany in 2007, evaluating not only the acceptance of the application among teachers and pupils but also whether the approach, as an innovative part of the curriculum, actually helps to reduce bullying in schools.