Considering the above justification for the project, partners established two main objectives: 1) design and develop a 3D Virtual World Learning Environment (VWLE), using the potential of a gamification-based approach, by which students would engage in activities that would help them to be better prepared to deal with curricular activities that induce stress and ultimately help them to increase their stress awareness and enhance their stress coping mechanisms; and 2) incorporate into the virtual environment, mechanisms and tools that are familiar and engaging for students, such as gamified mechanisms, cooperative play, social interactions, and avatar personalization. To accomplish these goals, our team established as secondary objectives: 1) the assessment of students’ needs (i.e., assess their levels of academic stress and anxiety, identify stressful school situations from their perspectives), understand the possible game scenarios that could be interesting to include in the3D VWLE , and produce educational material that can be embedded in the game scenarios; 2) development of a multidisciplinary and friendly gamified 3D VWLE; 3), testing the 3D VWLE usability, as well as the effectiveness of the psychoeducational materials.
POSITIVE project emerged from the recognition that mental health is a worldwide concern, with several organizations advocating for preventive/universal interventions in this field, and from early ages (e.g., WHO,2021). More specifically, international literature stresses that children and adolescents are reporting increasing levels of anxiety and academic stress (Kristensen et al., 2023), underlining the important role of school contexts in fostering mental health literacy and acting as protective contexts to prevent these phenomena (EU, 2022). Particularly in schools, students report feeling increasingly pressured academically due to the work, evaluations, and tasks they must complete, and as the school year(s) progress, students tend to feel increasingly worse and more pression (Löfstedt et al., 2020). Hence, schools must provide students with opportunities that enhance their abilities to identify signs of stress, as well as to learn about effective strategies to manage it. Gamified virtual learning environments are useful in a variety of educational and fostering engagement and motivation.In this sense, we proposed to develop a 3D VWLE that could simulate real-life scenarios based on school life that are stressful to students