2020
By Hande Sungur & Jessica Piotrowski
While public awareness for environmental protection has been rising, individuals still resist making necessary changes in their daily lives to help. Promoting sustainable behaviour is challenging because consequences of not engaging in these behaviours (e.g., climate change, plastic pollution), tend to be psychologically distant from our reality. Virtual Reality (VR) technology provides the opportunity to bring psychologically distant events closer and allow audiences to engage in important but typically “distant” topics such as sustainability in a unique way. While there is great interest in integration of digital tools such as VR in education, especially in the field of sustainability, there is still much that we do not know about using immersive environments with children. This project by taking into developmental considerations into account aims to improve our understanding of designing effective immersive experiences for children. Specifically, we design a developmentally appropriate VR environment that aims to educate children about plastic pollution in oceans.