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Playground Heroes Game
 

What is the Playground Heroes videogame?

Playground Heroes is an educational game that aims at teaching children about discriminatory bullying. Nine-twelve years old children that will play the game will be encouraged to act safely as defenders and peacemakers when witnessing prejudice- based bullying episodes among peers. When playing the game, children will be assigned to an avatar with their name who is part of a team of other seven characters, aimed at winning a competition for the best school playground in their country. Across the scenarios, players will witness prejudice based bullying situations and the way they will contribute to solve them will lead to develop a more positive teamwork and gain better resources to work on collaborative tasks to build the best playground and win the competition. Children will be also presented with positive peer role models who will act as positive active bystanders to solve discriminatory bullying situations.

What are the Playground Heroes’ aims?

This videogame aims at:

  • Decreasing moral disengagement and developing empathy and sense of responsibility towards children who are bullied because of prejudice (week 1);
  • Enhancing critical skills for evaluating peer norms and peer pressure (week 2);
  • Improving self- efficacy regarding strategies for effectively stopping and discouraging prejudice- based bullying (week 3).

What type of game is it?

The game alternates:

  • Dialogues among the game characters and between the game characters and the game user;
  • Prejudice-based bullying situations to which the player is asked to respond selecting one of three courses of action from a multiple- choice list;
  • Assignation of resources to the player as feedback to their responses to the prejudice based bullying situations. This feedback is supposed to reinforce choices that are effective in solving prejudice base-bullying situations and promote positive and productive teamwork.
  • Building sessions. The player will engage in building tasks whose results will depend on the quantity and quality of the resources gained as a result of the efficacy of their intervention in prejudice based bullying situations.

Who are the characters in the game?

There are seven characters in the game who are described as the player’s teammates to build up the best school playground in the country. The characters have a diverse background, differing for religion, race and physical appearance (one of the characters is targeted because he is overweight).

Who is the Playground Heroes video for?

This videogame is targeting 10-12 years old pupils and it is in the process of been evaluated in four different countries (UK, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Greece). This resource will be accessible online to other countries and we would welcome feedback from teachers and schools that will use it.

Can the Playground Heroes video alone reduce prejudice- based bullying in children of the targeted age group?

Playground Heroes is part of a whole school intervention. It is going to be implemented together with accompanying lesson plans and an anti-prejudice activity. Teachers will also take the online teacher training about prejudice- based bullying before delivering it. The Playground Heroes videogame is an essential and necessary part of this anti-prejudice- based bullying intervention but we recommend to use it with all the other provided resources.

Downloading the game

To download the game, please click the link below.

Playground Heroes V1.03

Download the source code of the game.

The downloaded file is a .zip file. Installation of the game is not required, but you do need to extract the zip-file to play the game. Here you can download the game user manual in which is explained how the game should be used:

NOTE: Most computers can open .zip files. If you are not able to open the file, you can use 7-zip. This is a safe and free program and can be downloaded from https://www.7-zip.org/.