The Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project: a COVID-19 response

Have you been thinking about how settings of learning might be designed to help nurture socially responsible behaviour, such as investing the self-discipline to develop the habit of social distancing? We invite you to our sharing on the SORBET Project.

This talk describes the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project, which is a pedagogical approach currently enacted in an OpenSimulator immersive environment. The approach seeks to encourage the investment of self-discipline to develop the habit of social distancing. Inspired by the genre of zombie virus diffusion games, the approach comprises two complementary halves, namely an in-world activity during which participants interact with each other, followed by an opportunity for post-activity discussion of their decision-making and behaviours (during the in-world half) catalysed by data of the group’s interactions and ‘virus’ transmission, as accessed by the group through a web-based dashboard. In this way, the approach seeks to afford participants with more authentic understandings of the need to invest in cultivating new socially responsible habits, by addressing the following two problems: first, in our daily lives, we do not receive immediate nor directed feedback on the decisions we take with respect to reducing the diffusion of COVID-19; feedback is given through the release of case numbers the following day, and is not particular to our respective individual actions and behaviours. Second, each person’s understanding of what constitutes one’s personal safe radius differs, and - more significantly - is tacit to each individual. Through the use of the open-source immersive environment, we are able to augment understandings of personal safe radii through coloured discs which momentarily appear around each avatar. The SORBET Project was developed in April and several schools in Singapore have expressed the intention to have their students participate in it during the second half of 2020.

The SORBET Project runs on OpenSimulator, and is therefore accessible through a PC or Mac with the appropriate viewer software (eg, the Firestorm viewer). The environment can either be instantiated on an ad hoc basis or can be hosted on solutions such as Kitely. The team behind the project has been working with teachers in Singapore and the region on the use of immersive environments in learning, since 2009.