The overall goal of the project is to use virtual role plays to find a new way for conflict resolutions with a playful and cooperative approach.

The aVataR@School project aims to establish virtual role plays in which pupils, teachers and others try out strategies for conflict resolution by means of the School Peer Mediation approach.

Each virtual role plays will take plave in the most popular 3D online digital world: OpenSim (http://www.opensimulator.org). For each of the role plays a scenario will be worked out to represent a typical conflict in school (e.g. social exclusion, bullying or violence). In each scenario players will try to find common solutions in a cooperative and collaborative way.

• First phase: it will be created the firsts scenarios and published in this website. In order to help playing the virtual role plays in SecondLife it will be done two guides: one to introduce players in the SecondLife world and to explain the rules of the role plays and the other for helping mediators to assist the virtual role plays.
• Second phase: It will be played “internal” virtual role plays : the mediators belonging to partners’ staff will play these games. In this way they will get used to the role play platform and will report problems or improvements to bring about the software in use. Moreover they will test and directly analyze the sequence of tasks necessary to conduct a VRP;
• Third phase: It will be played “external” virtual role plays: the mediators belonging to partners’ staff will invite students and teachers from their network schools. In this phase of the project is still possible to modify and improve the software and the approach to conduct the VRP, on the basis of difficulties or requests come out by the players. In each VRP there will be one moderator-mediator from a partner’ staff and one co-moderator from another partner’ staff
• Fourth phase: It will be played “open” virtual role plays : in this step the VRPs will be open to the Internet public and, as like as in the external VRP, there will be one moderator-mediator and one co-moderator.

The partnership for the project:

• CINECA (http://www.cineca.it), Coordinator - Italy
• Actionwork (http://www.actionwork.com) - United Kingdom
• Associazione Equilibrio (http://www.ass-equilibrio.it) - Italy
• Centre of Mediation of Sant Pere de Ribes Municipality (http://www.santperederibes.cat) - Spain
• Project Wolf (http://www.suejennings.com/wolf.html) - Romania
• Zentrum für empirische pädagogische Forschung der Universität Koblenz-Landau (http://www.zepf.uni-landau.de) - Germany

Download: (click on the flag to download the document in your favorite language)

• General Avatar@School brochure