One story and many ways of learning to create content children love to learn from
We combine one story and many ways of learning like movies, songs, audio, interactivity, VR, reading, coloring, drawing, singing, dancing, live shows
We base our efficiency on carefully chosen research-based elements, a step-by step fast testing process with our specialists plus more than 20 children and families, our huge experience and amazing previous results. All this allow us to make the experience very appealing by incorporating the right dosage of richness, humor, metaphors whimsical stories, interactivity, curiosity, exploring the magical inner and outer worlds and many other reasons you can find [here]
Our tools increase student motivation by making learning more fun and relatable
Moreover, we use the following:
Play
By Doing / Interaction
Visual Art
Fun
Metaphors
Stories
Animations
Games
Interactivity children love in our Apps and games and also in our live shows
Illusions
Please see some of the research we base upon to create content children love to learn from:
The efficacity of VR in learning and in work with different psychopathologies:
VR for post-traumatic shock disorder:
Albert “Skip” Rizzo, director of medical virtual reality at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, has worked with many soldiers, and explains how it works. “Traditional exposure therapy to treat PTSD relies on the person imagining the situation related to the trauma. But one of the key symptoms of PTSD is avoidance of the cues and reminders of the trauma. So it’s hard to expect someone to create a vivid mental image of something they’re trying to avoid.
“We place the person in VR simulations that the clinician can control in real time, and customise based on that person’s experience, but in a safe environment.” To do this, Rizzo and his team created 14 virtual worlds, varying from a large Middle Eastern city to remote outposts.
source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/20/can-virtual-reality-cure-phobias
Edger Dale’s Cone of Experience has shown that the average person only remembers 20% of what they hear and 30% of what they see, but up to 90% of what they personally experience. As a result, VR educational materials provide the scenario needed to build the attention gap, helping students to become more attentive during lessons.
Source: http://www.qscience.com/doi/pdf/10.5339/qproc.2015.elc2014.6
Date: 2014
This meta-analysis done in 2014 found that students actually do learn better when immersed in virtual worlds.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131513002108
Date: 2013
VR usefulness for learning to handle phobias:
In fact, it already is. Fear of heights (acrophobia) is typically – and successfully – treated by exposure therapy. The person is helped to face progressively more challenging situations, discovering as they do so that the danger they fear doesn’t materialise: they are safe. What’s remarkable is that exposure therapy using VR is just as effective as taking people into real situations. That’s because if you take someone with acrophobia in a virtual glass-fronted lift up a skyscraper, for example, their reactions (heart racing, stomach churning, panicky thoughts) will be the same as if they were truly zooming to the top of the Shard. Ask anyone – phobia or no phobia – to step off a virtual ledge and they’re very rarely able to do so (even though the “edge” is simply a space on our lab floor).
It’s not just fear of heights that VR seems so well suited to tackling: it works for a wide range of anxiety disorders. A recent meta-analysis of fourteen clinical trials, for example, found that VR treatment is effective for tackling spider and flying phobias. Evidence is also growing for VR’s potential in treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. So what, we wondered, could it do for patients experiencing another kind of condition marked by fear of imminent danger: persecutory delusions?
Persecutory delusions – unfounded, strongly held beliefs that other people intend to harm us – have traditionally been regarded as a key symptom of psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia. They are better conceived as the severe end of a paranoia spectrum in the general population, with paranoid thoughts much more common than previously thought. Delusions are notoriously difficult to treat, so there’s a pressing need for new ways of tackling the problem – which is where VR comes in. In a Medical Research Council (MRC) funded study at the University of Oxford we’ve just completed the first experiment in using VR to treat persecutory delusions. We wanted to tackle the fundamental fear that we believe underlies paranoia: the sense of danger from other people. The most effective way to do that is to help the individual learn from experience that the situations they dread are actually safe. As the feeling of safety increases, so the delusion …
… we encouraged the participants to try things they would never contemplate in real life – boldly approaching the VR characters, for example, or staring at them.
The results of the experiment are published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry. They paint a very striking picture of the power of cognitive VR in particular. Immediately after the VR therapy session, eight of the 15 patients who had VRCT no longer had persecutory delusions (ie. they had greater doubt than certainty in the threat beliefs).
When we asked patients to rate how strongly they believed their paranoid thoughts on a scale of 0-100%, VRCT patients averaged 80% at the beginning of the testing session but 47% at the end.
Importantly, we saw real-world benefits too, with the VRCT group showing a drop by half in their self-reported distress in their second trip into a feared situation compared to the VRET group.
Please see more research about the efficiency of VR below 🙂
In our games the adults learn and are playfully guided to use emotional coaching
The Introduction of Emotion Coaching as a Whole School Approach in a Primary Specialist Social Emotional and Mental Health Setting: Positive Outcomes for All
Perspectives from pupils, staff, and families were gained via interviews and structured questionnaires alongside quantitative measures of pupil academic progress and staff and pupil behavior. Results: Results indicate that Emotion Coaching improved the pupil’s ability to regulate their feelings and had a positive effect upon teacher-pupil relationships. Family-school relationships were supported by the school’s use of and modeling of Emotion Coaching with families and the ethos of attunement and non-judgemental interactions implicit in Emotion Coaching. Emotion Coaching promoted an increase in shared emotional language and trust. Shared emotional language and trust were key in the development of both teacher-pupil and family-school relationships. There was an improvement in well-being in that: rates of pupil restraint decreased, pupils made better than expected academic progress, staff absenteeism reduced, and families reported improved family life. Conclusion: We conclude that Emotion Coaching contributes to the promotion of sustainable, holistic improvement in wellbeing for pupils, school staff, and families.
Date: 2017
Emotion Coaching: A universal strategy for supporting and promoting sustainable emotional and behavioural well-being
This paper positions Emotion Coaching as a universal strategy for supporting sustainable emotional and behavioural well-being within community and educational contexts. It offers Emotion Coaching as an effective strategy that promotes resiliency skills and locates it within the broader social agenda. The paper will address the key elements of Emotion Coaching which reflect a bio-psycho-social model for universal well-being and are informed by theory and research from neuro-science, interpersonal neurobiology, developmental psychology and attachment theory. The paper will review the growing international evidence base for Emotion Coaching and its multi-disciplinary application to a range of professional and personal contexts. Emotion Coaching helps to create nurturing relationships that scaffold the development of effective stress management skills, develop capacities to promote emotional and behavioural self-regulation and support pro-social behaviours. We argue that Emotion Coaching is a simple, cost-effective, empowering and universal tool that can harness wel
It is the qualities of interpersonal relationships between children and key adults that is considered significant and integral to this discussion.
This paper proposes that Emotion Coaching can be both a technique (or tool) and a philosophical approach to emotions (Gilbert, 2013). Emotion Coaching supports the relationship between children and key adults, with the goal of improving children’s competencies to manage difficult feelings. It can be used as an ‘in the moment’ technique to manage and guide a child whose behavioural response may be inappropriate or unproductive for their own and others’ wellbeing, as well as an integrative tool to develop relationships with children and improve their emotional well-being. It is a multi-disciplinary approach that can be used in any community and educational context.
Date: 2015
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Janet_Rose5/publication/275041216_Emotion_Coaching_A_universal_strategy_for_supporting_and_promoting_sustainable_emotional_and_behavioural_well-being/links/556d9be408aefcb861d87bad/Emotion-Coaching-A-universal-strategy-for-supporting-and-promoting-sustainable-emotional-and-behavioural-well-being.pdf
We show nature movies and images and research suggest this will promote cooperative and environmentally sustainable behavior
Participants exposed to nature videos responded more cooperatively on a measure of social value orientation and indicated greater willingness to engage in environmentally sustainable behaviors. Collectively, results suggest that exposure to nature may increase cooperation, and, when considering environmental problems as social dilemmas, sustainable intentions and behavior.
Date: 2015
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494415000195
Source: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-25743-004
Please find more research about nature movies and VR movies and how it helps children and adults cope with stress, manage emotions and on physical health 🙂
Exposure to affect-matching music
While young children failed to discriminate systematically between fast tempo music conveying different emotions, they did display cognitive benefits from exposure to affect-matching music when both valence (e.g., mode) and arousal level (e.g. tempo) differentiated the musical excerpts, with no gender effects
Date: 2014
Source: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0305735614548500
Teaching through Video
Effects of teaching communication skills using a video clip on a smart phone on communication competence and emotional intelligence in nursing students
The experimental group improved more significantly than the control group in communication competence and emotional intelligence. Using a video clip on a smart phone is helpful for communication teaching method.
Date: 2015
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25858200
We use optical and other type of Illusions
Kahneman: Your Cognitive Biases Act Like Optical Illusions
“In visual perception, you have a process that suppresses ambiguity,” Kahneman tells Science of Us, “so that a single interpretation is chosen, and you’re not aware of the ambiguity.”
“When we reach interpretations, many of the characteristics of visual perception are retained, like a search for coherence, things that make sense together,” he said. “You’re very likely to perceive things that aren’t there in perception. All of us do that.”
“Where does confirmation bias come from? Confirmation bias comes from when you have an interpretation, and you adopt it, and then, top down, you force everything to fit that interpretation,” Kahneman says. “That’s a process that we know occurs in perception that resolves ambiguity, and it’s highly plausible that a similar process occurs in thinking.” Which is precisely why you — or a president — shouldn’t trust everything you think. Unfortunately, the more powerful you are, the more you believe your own thoughts.
Source: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/kahneman-biases-act-like-optical-illusions.html
Media usage children love and use
“We are the most computerized generation, so we have to talk to people where they are: on the internet”
Digital technology has already changed the world – and as more and more children go online around the world, it is increasingly changing childhood.
Youth (ages 15–24) is the most connected age group. Worldwide, 71 per cent are online compared with 48 per cent of the total population.
Children and adolescents under 18 account for an estimated one in three internet users around the world.
A growing body of evidence indicates that children are accessing the internet at increasingly younger ages. In some countries, children under 15 are as likely to use the internet as adults over 25.
Smartphones are fuelling a ‘bedroom culture’, with online access for many children becoming more personal, more private and less supervised.
Connectivity can be a game changer for some of the world’s most marginalized children, helping them fulfil their potential and break intergenerational cycles of poverty
Date: 2017
Source: https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOWC_2017_ENG_WEB.pdf
Please find more statistics about children and media usage here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/768809/daily-media-usage-children-by-age/
Learning and using life skills by using an app for adults
This is achieved using three interventions: brain actions, mind actions, and real-world actions. Each of these interventions uses a different type of action to facilitate neural modification. Brain actions require that the participant play games that create new neural structures for the maladaptive trait. In mind actions, participants are encouraged to create new associations for situations that they have recently experienced that triggered the maladaptive trait. This results in modification of the neural structures associated with those situations. Real-world actions prompt the client to engage in real life activities that are typically either avoided by the individual or trigger an unwanted behavior, because of their maladaptive trait. The real-world actions create new associations/memories between the real world and new behaviors that counter the maladaptive trait to further modify neural structures.
Date: 2018
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5829461/
Efficiency of using metaphors and stories in learning and training emotional intelligence skills
Metaphors:
Metaphors – it appears that the comprehension and production of metaphorical language involves transfer of knowledge from one conceptual domain to another
“If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”
– Joseph Campbell
Learning and Metaphor: Bridging the Gap Between the Familiar and the Unfamiliar
In this chapter metaphors and related figures of speech are shown to be necessary and integral parts of sense making and learning. It is shown how this kind of speech has been studied in research in relation to children’s understanding and learning.
Date: 2018
Young Children’s Comprehension of Simple and Complex Metaphors Presented in Pictures and Words.
The results of this study show that children as young as 3 years old are able to metaphorically relate and explain domain resemblances based on implicit, as well as explicit, criteria. Across all materials, children were better able to perceive metaphorical relations in pictures than in words. These results suggest that metaphoric competence is present at an early age. They also suggest that metaphoric competence represents more than the ability to see perceptual relations between things-that it is a general strategic function at the service of children’s effort after meaning.
Date: 1994
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247503671_Young_Children’s_Comprehension_of_Simple_and_Complex_Metaphors_Presented_in_Pictures_and_Words [accessed Oct 10 2018].
The advantages which recommend metaphor use for cognitive behavioral therapy with children are delineated. Further, seven guidelines for clinical practice are outlined.
Date: 2010
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225157117_Metaphors_and_Stories_in_Cognitive_Behavioral_Therapy_with_Children
https://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/LearningMetaphors.html
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016782
https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-study-shows-how-a-good-metaphor-can-change-the-wor-1482482320
http://io9.gizmodo.com/this-study-shows-how-a-good-metaphor-can-change-the-wor-1482482320
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016782
http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/LearningMetaphors.html
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/19/james-geary-i-is-an-other-children-metaphor/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_stories_change_brain
https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-loves-good-storytelling
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/headlines-change-way-think
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
More about the efficacity of VR in learning and in work with different psychopathologies:
Virtual Reality in Health System: Beyond Entertainment. A Mini-Review on the Efficacy of VR During Cancer Treatment
Results found that VR improved patients’ emotional well-being, and diminished cancer-related psychological symptoms. The studies explored various relevant variables including different types of settings (i.e., during chemotherapy, during pain procedures, during hospitalization). Here, we point to the need of a global and multi-disciplinary approach aimed at analyzing the effects of VR taking advantage of the new technology systems like biosensors as well as electroencephalogram monitoring pre, during, and after intervention. Devoting more attention to bio-physiological variables, standardized procedures, extending duration to longitudinal studies and adjusting for motion sickness related to VR treatment need to become standard of this research field.
Is VR an intervention that could support patients during cancer-related treatment?
Yes, all the studies showed a reduction of the principal psychological variables related to stress conditions or to cancer. Implementing VR during the different phases of cancer treatment could support patients reducing their distress; moreover, the patients do not need any kind of training to use VR, which is without risk for the patient and very inexpensive for the Health Institution.
(iii) revealed that treatment-induced reduction of distress may enhance life expectancy (Giese-Davis et al., 2011);
Source: Giese-Davis J, Collie K, Rancourt KMS, Neri E, Kraemer HC, Spiegel D. 2011. Decrease in depression symptoms is associated with longer survival in patients with metastatic breast cancer: A secondary analysis. J Clin Oncol 29:413–420.
Nausea and vomiting during chemotherapy improved for all patients. The majority of patients also reported lower anxiety levels as they focused their attention on the movie.
Source: Kaneda M, Oyama H, Katsumata N. 1999. VR intervention therapy for emotion related cancer chemotherapy side effects. In: University W, editor. Tokyo: ICAT ’99 The Virtual Reality Society of Japan. pp 16–18.
Date: 2015
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280694109_Virtual_Reality_in_Health_System_Beyond_Entertainment_A_Mini-Review_on_the_Efficacy_of_VR_During_Cancer_Treatment
Stress and pain management:
For a child, even a simple medical procedure like a blood draw, needle poke, or IV insertion can be scary and stressful.
During these procedures, the child’s distress can negatively affect everyone in the room—including the child’s parents and the medical professional performing the task, explained Jeffrey I. Gold, Ph.D., director of the Pediatric Pain Management Clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and professor of anesthesiology, pediatrics, and psychiatry & behavioral sciences at the Keck School of Medicine, USC.
“When a child comes into phlebotomy to give blood, they can be screaming or crying, or just really nervous,” said Gold, in an interview with R&D Magazine. “The child tenses up, and when that happens it can be more challenging to insert a needle. Their muscles are taut, their heart rate is elevated, and they are fidgety in the chair. The parents then become stressed. Sometimes the phlebotomist experiences all of this distress and maybe it takes him or her a couple of times to insert the needle correctly. That is a bad outcome.”
Gold and his team at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are taking a unique approach to reducing a child’s distress during blood draws and other acute painful medical procedures—virtual reality (VR).
In Gold’s clinic, patients have the opportunity to wear a VR headset during routine procures like blood draws, and play a game specifically designed to be used in this setting.
“When a child is experiencing VR during their blood draw, they are more relaxed, they are having fun, giggling, or smiling,” said Gold. “When that happens, it makes it a lot easier for the phlebotomist, and when the kid is calm, the parent is calm. The whole temperature of the room just kind of comes down because everyone is a lot more relaxed.”
Why it works
While VR does work in part, by distracting the patient from the pain, it is actually doing much more than that, said Gold.
Through past work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Gold has discovered that VR actually activates endogenous biological mechanisms that are know to be associated with pain inhibition.
“I believe that there are other mechanisms at play that contribute to our capacity to inhibit incoming pain signals as a result of playing in the virtual reality environment, that are different than just being distracted,” said Gold. “The virtual reality as I witnessed it in our imaging studies demonstrated that our frontal lobe—the part of our brain that contributes to inhibiting incoming signals—was activated during the VR conditions, when it wasn’t activated during the control condition.”
Source: https://www.rdmag.com/article/2017/08/virtual-reality-reduces-pain-anxiety-kids-hospitals
Efficacity of VR treatment:
Furthermore, patients undergoing VRET performed better on behavioral assessments at post-treatment than patients on wait-list (g = 1.41). Additionally, results of behavioral assessment at post-treatment and at follow-up revealed no significant differences between VRET and exposure in vivo (g = -0.09 and 0.53, respectively). Finally, behavioral measurement effect sizes were similar to those calculated from self-report measures. The findings demonstrate that VRET can produce significant behavior change in real-life situations and support its application in treating specific phobias.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26355646
Social Integration of Students
Helping students to connect with their peers is essential for creating a positive learning environment for students. VR technology can foster social integration of learners within a classroom environment by bringing together students who have different learning styles and needs. This finding is according to Dr. Conor Galvin at the University College Dublin School of Education and Lifelong Learning who evaluated the MissionV Schools Pilot Programme, which involved 20 primary schools.
According to Dr. Galvin, students who struggled to become part of the class group were able to become accepted by their peers because of their technology skills and students lacking in confidence were able to come out of their shells.
“Additional evidence which wasn’t published to the site, pointed to especially positive outcomes for individual children from ethnic minorities, or with learning difficulties, or experiencing problems at home,” said MissionV’s Corbett. “In fact, we heard some particularly heartwarming stories in that regard.”
The programme was also used successfully with gifted children and produced impressive results according to the teachers in the pilot schools. It also created unique opportunities for students to peer teach, helping them to deepen their own understanding and improve their self-confidence.
Source: https://unimersiv.com/benefits-virtual-reality-classroom/
Date: May 2017
The present study shows that VR exposure can be effective with relatively cheap hardware and software on stand-alone computers currently on the market. Further studies into the effectiveness of VR exposure are recommended in other clinical groups as agoraphobics and social phobics and studies in which VR exposure is compared with more emerging virtual worlds as presented in CAVE-type systems.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12038644
Vr learning effciacity: