Schools offer quite convenient opportunities for bullying, as pupils from different social and cultural backgrounds and equipped with different personalities and attitudes are forced to get along for a rather big part of their day. Bullying is a stable behavioural pattern that often takes place behind the backs of teachers and parents. It includes not only overt violent behaviour like hitting or punching, but also rather secret social exclusion strategies like rejecting fellow students from friendships and social relations or ignoring them altogether.


It is important to stress that by definition bullying happens on a regular basis; singular violent outbursts do not qualify as bullying. Long-term consequences for the victims are grave and range from underachievement in school to damaged self-esteem, depression, anxiety, health problems, and even suicide. It is quite controversial what victims can do to stop the bullying; however, social networks are in any case of help. Victims need to inform teachers and parents, and they need friends in whom they can confide and who might act as defenders against the bully.


The main focus of the project is on the development of interactive role-play software that allows for private and immersive interaction with autonomous characters who attend a virtual school in which bullying takes place. The pupil witnesses the virtual bullying as an observer and is provided with the possibility of helping and assisting the victim as their 'invisible friend'.


Hence, pupils can learn vicariously about the disastrous consequences that bullying has on the victim, and by developing an empathic relationship towards the virtual victim, they come up with strategies and advice in order to prevent or combat bullying. Both the empathic understanding of the damage done by bullying and the knowledge of strategies that can be employed against bullies may help to reduce real bullying in their daily lives in school.


The consortium 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 in the development of a framework for using it in the classroom context. Preliminary usability studies showed that even though graphics is a big issue to the age group, children like the interaction with the virtual characters and found the content highly interesting and believable.


The 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 adds significantly to conventional didactics as far as social and emotional learning is concerned.