POSITIVE: Prevention Of Stress by exploITing an Innovative Virtual Environment

POSITIVE project emerged from the recognition that mental health is a worldwide concern, with several organizations advocating for preventive/universal interventions in this field, and from early ages (e.g., WHO,2021). More specifically, international literature stresses that children and adolescents are reporting increasing levels of anxiety and academic stress (Kristensen et al., 2023), underlining the important role of school contexts in fostering mental health literacy and acting as protective contexts to prevent these phenomena (EU, 2022). Particularly in schools, students report feeling increasingly pressured academically due to the work, evaluations, and tasks they must complete, and as the school year(s) progress, students tend to feel increasingly worse and more pression (Löfstedt et al., 2020). Hence, schools must provide students with opportunities that enhance their abilities to identify signs of stress, as well as to learn about effective strategies to manage it. Gamified virtual learning environments are useful in a variety of educational and fostering engagement and motivation.In this sense, we proposed to develop a 3D VWLE that could simulate real-life scenarios based on school life that are stressful to students

Considering the above justification for the project, partners established two main objectives: 1) design and develop a 3D Virtual World Learning Environment (VWLE), using the potential of a gamification-based approach, by which students would engage in activities that would help them to be better prepared to deal with curricular activities that induce stress and ultimately help them to increase their stress awareness and enhance their stress coping mechanisms; and 2) incorporate into the virtual environment, mechanisms and tools that are familiar and engaging for students, such as gamified mechanisms, cooperative play, social interactions, and avatar personalization. To accomplish these goals, our team established as secondary objectives: 1) the assessment of students’ needs (i.e., assess their levels of academic stress and anxiety, identify stressful school situations from their perspectives), understand the possible game scenarios that could be interesting to include in the3D VWLE , and produce educational material that can be embedded in the game scenarios; 2) development of a multidisciplinary and friendly gamified 3D VWLE; 3), testing the 3D VWLE usability, as well as the effectiveness of the psychoeducational materials.

The team completed several activities to achieve the project goals. All partners actively collaborated in all tasks, demonstrating high levels of cooperation in the activities, which potentiated the project's smooth development and high-quality discussions and outcomes. Dissemination activities were performed, which allowed the project´s visibility; positive feedback was obtained from teachers, students, scientific community and stakeholders. A needs assessment study involving 276 students and 33 teachers, who completed questionnaires and participated in focus groups, was conducted, along with a desk research (summarized in reports: national, transnational; PR1); we developed 7game scenarios scripts with educational material (PR1); alpha, beta and final version of the 3DVWLE were developed along with 2 users manuals (PR2); we documented the 3DVWLE development through a usability study on each scenarios version, and a feasibility study during implementation (PR3). The piloting of the 3D VWLE involved 216 students, who played with the different versions and provided feedback supporting the improvement the 3D VWLE to ensure this was enjoyable and useful for students to learn about stress management skills in a friendly way.

PR1: Students’ needs, game scenarios, educational material, five reports were developed (one for each country; one transnational). Materials provided useful insights for professionals about academic stress and anxiety in a national and transnational scenario. PR2: Development of the 3D VWLE Alpha, Beta, and Final outputs: (1) the Virtual World (Alpha, Beta and Final versions), with 7 scenarios; (2) the User Manual – short version and detailed manual (available in English and national languages); and (3) two demonstrative videos of the environment. Moreover, a report was produced explaining how our 3D VWLE was developed. PR3: Documentation of the implementation and testing of the 3D VWLE our team completed three major tasks: 1) Implementation of all versions of our 3D VWLE, 2) Analyzing survey's results, and 3) Documentation of these results (i.e., usability and efficacy reports). Outputs include three reports about the usability of the 3D VWLE: (i) alpha version testing; (ii) beta version testing; (iii) final version testing; a report on the potential effectiveness of material; four conference presentations; and one scientific paper.