Immersive Empathy: Using Immersive Technologies to Narrate Community Challenges
Year Awarded
2022
Amount
€39,802
- Organisation:University of Galway
- Audience:Transition Year Students
- Format:Formal Education
- Location:Galway
- Topic:STEAM
Project Summary
The goal of the Immersive Empathy project is to promote knowledge, interest and engagement in STEM related subjects amongst typically disadvantaged post-primary students, and create awareness of how immersive technologies can be used to respond to community or societal challenges. Taking a co-creation approach to exploring and responding to community challenges through virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies and working with transition year students in DEIS schools, the project will utilize peer-to-peer oral history techniques to facilitate students in identifying challenges and opportunities within their school and place-based communities, including environmental and social justice issues. Over a series of workshops, Immersive Empathy will provide the student group with technical training in immersive technologies as well as exploring narrative structure and storytelling responses to social challenges.
Over a two-month period, the student groups will produce narrative VR films or AR applications that respond to a social challenge identified in the initial exploratory phase. The student group will then test the impact of the VR/AR experiences on empathy levels amongst the rest of the school student population towards people experiencing the impacts of the identified social challenge. Immersive Empathy will integrate arts based approaches to learning with a focus on STEM skills and invite students to explore the capacity of creative projects to produce social change. Immersive Empathy’s co-creation approach will help students to understand STEM and creative practice as tools for responding to their social environments and concerns.