[prelude: a very warm welcome to all visitors browsing by from Hamlet Au's (RL: Wagner James Au's) kind referencing of this post at his New World Notes blog :-) thank you very much, Hamlet :-) i truly appreciate it! ]

[we also extend a warm welcome to HGSE EdM students of Dr Christine Reich's T523 :-) ]

Since March 2020, we have been collaborating with a team of Mathematics teachers to develop a response to COVID-19.

We would like to give young learners a more embodied understanding (with a view to behaviour modification / the nurturing of values) of the importance of safe- / social-distancing.

We were prompted to work on the SORBET Project because while modelling of the diffusion of viruses through populations has been done, such resources tend to be in the form of animations of graphs, and this may come across as too abstract for young learners to grasp the gravity of.

Our acronym SORBET stands for Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking.

We therefore worked with some Mathematics teachers - to ground the intervention in the curricular context of probabilities - to design a simple, open-source, immersive environment (not needing VR goggles), in which learners interact with each other - through their avatars.

Subsequent to this stage of interaction in the environment, teachers facilitate group discussions (online / remote-learning, or face-to-face) on the degree to which a ‘virus’ has diffused amongst themselves.

The latter is possible because each interaction the learners have within the immersive environment is recorded by way of a shared dataset and an arbitrary threshold is assigned (by the teacher) which would trigger the diffusion of the virus.

Thus, over time, the diffusion of the virus among the population can be charted (for post-activity discussion), after the students have first had their embodied interactions.

The discussion of the aggressiveness of the diffusion is thus grounded in their prior experiences of interaction.

We have specifically designed the environment to be able to be enacted in low network infrastructure environments. for example, if the intervention is carried out in a school-based setting, the school need not have access to the wider internet as the intervention can just be run on a Local Area Network within the classroom itself, off of a USB-thumb-drive attached to the teacher’s computer (using the teacher’s computer as the server).

The point of the SORBET Project is helping learners develop a greater appreciation of the need to practise social distancing.

Essentially, the way we would frame the problem would be:

Each day, we go about our daily interactions (to the extent to which we are ‘allowed’ outside), and, the next day, we get updates from our local authorities about what the case numbers from the previous day are.

There is a time lag between our action, and, the feedback to our action.

So, it is difficult for us to make the connection between our action, and the consequences thereof.

Therefore, some of us might be less predisposed to develop the new habit of social distancing.

What SORBET tries to do is to provide learners with a mediatory bridging scaffold between action, and consequence.

Second, SORBET also reduces the time lag between the two.

To elaborate on the first point: we all have to develop the new habit of keeping a certain distance apart.

But there is no practicable means to provide positive reinforcement to our behaviour, and also no practicable means for any form of personal augment which makes us continually aware of our respective personal radii of 'safe' operation.

In contrast, in an appropriately designed virtual environment, we can have these practicable means.

Until we as the human race develop the new habit of instinctual distancing, we need augments.

Jim Gee’s theory of Projective Identity speaks towards how the virtual augments of the SORBET Project inform our 'Real Life' selves, decisions, and behaviours.

That is the thinking behind the design of the SORBET Project :-)

you are welcome to read my interview with Ms Lory Hough, who is the editor of Ed., the semestral magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The SORBET Project has won a number of awards:

The SORBET Project has been chosen to be featured at the Project Showcase of the 6th international conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network, 21 - 25 June 2020.

The student intern responsible for the initial transposition of the code-base of SORBET from desktops to tablets / smartphones won the highest award he was eligible for - 'Highly Commended' in the Education category - in the Global Undergraduate Awards 2021.

A study on SORBET conducted by two of my student interns from Cedar Girls' Secondary School under the auspices of the Nanyang Technological University's Nanyang Research Programme was awarded the Singapore Association for the Advancement of Science Special Award during the Singapore Science and Engineering Fair 2021.

We have also shared the project during the 10th annual symposium of the Mobiles for Education Alliance, 14 - 16 September 2020.

The project is also featured in the December 2020 issue of SingTeach, which is a publication of the Office of Education Research, National Institute of Education, Singapore.

SORBET was also featured in the 25 January 2021 issue of the Singapore Press Holdings schools' newspaper IN.