In the Europe of the 21st century, many cultural, ethnic and religious groups must live and work together. It is clear that this is not always a smooth process and that cultural differences can lead to social stresses and sometimes outright conflict. Education in cultural sensitivity and understanding has a very significant role as a component of Personal, Social and Emotional Education. This is an educational domain in which attitudes and behaviours are much more important than knowledge alone, and in which the development of empathy is a key pedagogical mechanism. Experiential approaches using role-play and case-studies have been shown to be highly effective for social, personal and emotional learning, but can be difficult and expensive to organise if actors or other human interaction mechanisms are employed, or limited by a lack of interactivity in the case of film or written case-studies.

eCUTE will develop innovative technologically-enhanced learning approaches in cultural understanding and sensitivity that will help to deal with these problems. It will develop and apply virtual world simulations with intelligent interactive graphical characters embodying models of culturally-specific behaviour and interaction in scenarios developed via a user-centred design process. It will target two end-user types – late primary-age children (9-11) and young adults (18-25) – as contrasting groups over which useful generalisations can be developed.

The project will:

•  Develop pedagogical approaches to education in cultural understanding grounded in psychological and educational theory
• Create believable cultural learning scenarios based on theoretical approaches that connect with the experiences of the target learner groups
•  To establish an operational parameterisation of theoretically derived cultural behaviour and use it to create synthetic cultures and characters that behave as if they live within such cultures
• Develop expressive behaviour for synthetic characters that is culturally appropriate
• Create two cultural Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), one for late-primary children and the other for young adults based on virtual dramas using synthetic characters with culturally-specific interaction behaviour
• Evaluate the created systems with stakeholder, teacher and learner groups, demonstrating the learning efficacy of the showcases with the intention of leveraging further funding and commercial opportunities.