National Project

The PROPS project enters the testing phase

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On March 14th, the video game Unbully, created by Gabriel Evangelista, went to the Agrupamento de Escolas João da Rosa, in the municipality of Olhão, to be tested by elementary school students. Unbully, emerges from an artistic process focused on creating positive relationships aimed at preventing online hate speech. This initial testing process, led by researcher Susana Costa, is part of PROPS – Interactive Narratives Propose Pluralistic Discourse, and marks a new phase of this project.

In turn, starting from April, the installation-game IN[The Hate Booth] will be at the Francisco Fernandes Lopes School Group, also in Olhão, where it will be tested by several classes from elementary to high school, with the mediation of an educational itinerary and with the support of the School Library of that group.

IN[The Hate Booth] is an immersive space that invites the interactor to engage with its luminous environment. Inside the booth, it is possible to find the feed of a web page that seems to have been discontinued and whose only access corresponds to the post-mortem. Through an interactive fiction challenge, the player is invited to discover what happened and what led the authors of the page to close it.

After an initial phase, where the team developed a literature review on hate speech and questionnaires directed at students between the ages of 12 and 18 about the prevalence of this phenomenon, the different members of the PROPS group have been developing a set of counter-narratives that aim to act on prevention and media education. After several months of research and production of various educational resources, PROPS is now preparing to enter the final stage of the project, which will involve testing and validating these educational tools.

PROPS is an initiative developed by CIAC, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, in partnership with the Polytechnic Institute of Santarém, Universidade Aberta, and the University of Beira Interior.

Get to know PROPS project (here).