Design and evaluation of an augmented reality cyberphysical game for the development of empathic abilities

Digital Games to Develop Empathy in Students: A Scoping Review

“…Furthermore, the game "EmpathyAR" creatively utilizes augmented reality to provide tasks that involve helping virtual characters in distress (López-Faican & Jaen, 2023). By encouraging players to seek solutions and aid these characters, the game prompts individuals to step into others' shoes and experience empathy through action, offering a unique approach to empathy development.…”

“…Emotional empathy is the unconscious emotional response to someone else's emotions. The third dimension called behavioral or motivational or compassionate empathy, refers to the action in response to someone else's feeling (Boltz et al, 2015) (López-Faican & Jaen, 2023). Empathy has recently been promoted as the desirable outcome (Knezek et al, 2022), leading researchers and instructors to develop curricular interventions for fostering empathy in engineering education (Preethi B et al, in press).…”

“…Digital games, once primarily seen as sources of entertainment, are now recognized as powerful tools that can engage players on emotional, cognitive, and social dimensions (Yusoff et al, 2018) (Wulansari et al, 2020). By immersing players in diverse and complex virtual worlds, digital games offer unique opportunities to experience different perspectives, confront challenging scenarios, and practice empathetic decision-making in a safe environment (López-Faican & Jaen, 2023). Empathy is developed in learning contexts where the learner is familiar, similar, and proximal to the protagonist, which often poses a challenge in designing learning environments.…”

Gamification Strategies as Socialization Tools in the Context of Paediatric Hospitalization

“…After the user selected the task, a new screen would show the total amount of steps that are required to complete the task and where to go in order to start with the first one (Figure 51). The full results of the evaluation in this area, as well as other screenshots of the application while performing the tasks can be seen in [110]. However, it can be said in this section that it has a statistically significant impact on two areas of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (fantasy and empathic concern), and that the playing group achieved better results than the control group for the Prosocial Behavior questionnaire.…”

“…One example of this is [54], which found that a multi-tablet game to enhance collaborative learning in Primary Education obtained positive collaboration and socialization results from the participants. Another one is the study by Lopez-Faican and Jaen [110], in which they present an application oriented towards increasing the empathy of the participants. Also, collaboration, as outlined before, is an important effect of some gamification strategies.…”