JOINclusion: A Mobile Game for Social Inclusion in Multicultural School Contexts

Cultural diversity is pivotal in our society, making inclusive education a priority. Serious games offer unique avenues for fostering diversity in schools. JOINclusion, an Erasmus+ funded project, developed and tested a mobile game across Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands. The game aims to facilitate harmonious and prosocial interactions in multicultural school settings. It consists of two learning scenarios, each consisting of five levels, each one targeting specific Social- Emotional Learning (SEL) skills. Furthermore, a collaborative level is implemented, which allows children to practice the skills strengthened in the previous two scenarios. Thanks to a captivating and entertaining plot, children will have to search for magical gems scattered throughout the various rooms of the school and collaboratively solve social dilemmas, based on the game’s levels, to save the school from an evil witch who is intent on destroying it. Additionally, an easy-to-use authoring tool for school educators has been developed to generate customized materials for the collaborative level. This tool is provided as a web app and includes a variety of assets (characters, interactive objects, and inclusion-related scenes) for the teachers to create new scenarios that are allocated in the JOINclusion servers and can be directly and seamlessly deployed into the JOINclusion game. This study presents initial findings from the game's pilot phase, assessing its usability among children and the pre-and post-test effects on empathy and empathy-related responding skills. Additionally, leveraging machine learning, it analyses children's game interactions to group them based on similar patterns. This clustering holds the potential to predict social inclusion-related behaviours and identify influential game interaction features. The study revealed that students who played the game enjoyed the experience, expressed a desire to play it again, and acquired new skills and knowledge. Cluster analysis revealed three interaction profiles potentially predictive of expected behaviours and influential game features. Furthermore, the game showed promise in terms of increasing empathic and prosocial abilities, as well as improving the classroom climate. Further details will be discussed. JOINclusion offers an innovative platform for fostering empathic skills and cultural awareness among students. Also, the use of machine learning algorithms to study how children interact with a game makes it possible to gain a more nuanced understanding of their engagement and how to create inclusive environments.