By: Olli Personeni
The past couple of years have been marked by significant advancements regarding technology. There has been tremendous growth in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), cryptocurrency, and the expansion of the metaverse. The metaverse has the potential to outstretch the physical world using extended, augmented, and virtual reality features. As technology becomes a more integral part of education and learning, comes the possibility of using the metaverse to teach children valuable lessons. Being immersed in a fairytale through virtual reality increases the impact of a cautionary tale by stimulating parts of the brain currently inaccessible through film and language. By being immersed in the story the reader becomes an active participant rather than a spectator and their immersion in the tale enhances the experience, which can lead to the moral of the story having a greater impact on the child’s learning. Furthermore, through immersive learning, children will have the ability to enter the story and through their experience, they will be better able to understand and apply the valuable lessons of fairy tales into their own personal lives.
As generous as they are, fairytales teach a lesson only when someone is reading or being told the story. Moreover, there is an additional space between the story and its moral. Readers or listeners need to see and hear beyond the characters and the plot to really understand the lesson they are told. If a fairytale is experienced through the metaverse, its impact increases because virtual reality stimulates the cortical areas of the brain currently inaccessible through ordinary movies and language (Georgiev et al, 2021). In fact, neuroscience explains that digital information can push the brain to react to immersive situations exactly how it would react in real life. Immersive learning is therefore a game-changer for practice-based learning since it simulates real-life settings. It uses virtual spaces to separate users from their environments and immerse them into a completely different one where they become part of the learning experience (Aptara). If the world was duplicated as a fairytale, the story would be fully experienced by the learner, and the chances for the moral to be wholly absorbed would be higher. The relationship that is then created by neurotransmitters upon experiencing the fairytale firsthand, is clearly different and deeper than any story read, or any movie watched. Immersive learning is the bridge that would allow children to learn the fairytale lessons within the metaverse and the most suitable learning tool for cautionary tales in the contemporary world.
The concept of metaverse includes virtual reality, augmented reality, and digital economy where users can create goods and buy and sell them. Metaverse’s potential impact on the way activities and businesses develop and grow is likely to be transformational as the distinct lines between physical and digital are becoming more and more blurry and very far from current perceptions. Even if the “full virtual experience” does not exist yet, researchers are increasingly examining the transformative impact of the metaverse (Dwivedi, 2022). Impacted sectors include marketing, education, entertainment, and healthcare. According to Hirsh Patek et al. (2022) understanding how to support learning goals “through harnessing the power of active, engaging, meaningful, socially interactive, iterative, and joyful contexts will transform flashy and fun digital experiences into truly educational ones with true social interaction at their core” (Hirsh Patek et al., 2022). Therefore, the metaverse can offer a platform to encourage cooperation, develop creative thinking, and foster learning. The idea of using virtual reality as a tool to improve the learning experience of children is gaining ground. According to Hirsh Patek et a. (2022), to create a good education app learning needs to be active, and engaging rather than distractive, and iterative, which allows learning through different paths, and encourages social interaction. The key to making these apps effectively educational requires the game/activity to have “a well-articulated learning goal” (Hirsh Patek et al., 2022). What if that goal is learning a moral in a way that can be remembered and can ultimately foster behavioral change? And what if the content chosen to explain the moral is a fairy tale? To host fairytales in the metaverse means developing traditional characters in apps such that children can fully interact with them. This would allow the kids to experience Propp’s narrative functions, play character types in sequence, and learn the moral of the story by living it in the moment. A fairytale app hosted in the metaverse will result in a positive learning experience since it will assure engagement and action, as the player/character will actively assume their role. It will also encourage social interaction as friends could play different characters in the story and take turns promoting an iterative experience.
Why a cautionary tale makes good learning content and has it the ability to motivate change? Maria Tatar makes a very compelling argument when explaining why fairy tales still matter nowadays, “in an era when cynicism seems to have driven out wonder” (Tatar, 2010). It is the transformative experience of reading that is making fairy tales meaningful from an educational perspective, as every child reading a story is opening “the gate that separates him/her from Elsewhere. It gives him/her choices.” (Lowry, in Tatar, 2010). Fairy tales are defined as “portals to the wonder worlds,” where imagination, exploration, risks, and illusion are possible. The child reading fairy tales enters “Elsewhere” to learn something. According to Tatar, children approach language through fairy tales and master the “linguistic conventions that allow adults to do things with words, to produce effects that are achieved by saying something” (Tatar, 2010). Language is then the form of expression that can support behavioral changes, can create illusions, can make people act or think in a certain way. These stories help children learn that actions have consequences, their causes, and effects, that there is good and evil, and so on, which “marks the beginnings of some form of agency” (Tatar, 2010). Moreover, fairy tales have the power to elicit what Richard Wright has described as a “total emotional response” (Tatar, 2010). If children learn agency and emotions from fairytales, then the educational potential hidden in these stories is extremely valuable.
Not surprisingly, cautionary tales are adaptive enough to shape into the most suitable form at a point in time. Tatar shows the transformative power of tales starting from the way stories morph into new versions of themselves when told again and even more when they “migrate into other media.” Media are means to present a fairy tale, however, they also have the power to change the story, as the plot often is modified and some of the characters are adjusted to better suit the media where they are narrated. There are many examples of classical plots that were heavily adapted to better fit a movie, a cartoon, or a comic book. A recent movie that ties together fairy tales and the metaverse is the fantasy film Belle by Mamoru Hosoda. The movie takes place in modern Japan where the characters create an alternative identity for themselves in the metaverse, U. The story is a modern adaptation of the classic fairy tale, Beauty and The Beast. The main character of Belle is a quiet schoolgirl named Suzu whose alternative identity, Belle, becomes a singing sensation in U. In U she forms a friendship with the Dragon (the beast), the strongest and most feared user in the reality; much like the friendship that develops between Belle and the Beast. Throughout the movie, the characters bounce back and forth between the real world and U, and their lives become increasingly connected between the two. In the end, through the evidence and clues found in U, Suzu is able to identify the Dragon’s real identity and save him from danger. The fantasy film Belle shows a remarkable transformation of the classic tale and depicts a possible future where one’s ordinary life is strongly intertwined with the metaverse, and the potential positive outcomes that one can receive, such as new confidence, new friendship, and love.
Learning lessons through the metaverse, including the morals of fairytales, can be more powerful. Recent literature sustains that immersive learning through virtual reality increases “presence or agency” which maximizes the retaining experience of learners (Makranski and Petersen, 2021). “significantly improved retention, transfer, and self-efficacy when learning through virtual reality.” The findings were based on qualitative studies run on samples of undergraduate biochemistry students that are looking very promising in suggesting that when presence and agency are assured, and both are secured in immersive learning through virtual reality, learners benefit the most and retain the largest amount of information.
In more detail, Makranski and Petersen (2021) found that immersive learning in Little Red Riding Hood represents a very suitable example of how immersive learning through virtual reality can enhance the ability to understand lessons and foster behavioral change. In the Brother Grimm’s adaptation, (Little Red Riding Cap) it all starts with “I’ll do just as you say” (The Classic Fairy Tales, 18). The distended promise to her mother brings Little Red Cap to the forest and into the wolf’s arms. The girl leaves her path several times to see the sunbeams, the trees, and the beautiful flowers, and when she gets to her grandmother’s house, she finds the gate open and is taken by a “strange feeling” that something is not right. Indeed, it is not, as the wolf in disguise leaps out of Grandma’s bed and eats the girl. Luckily, the huntsman hears the loud snoring of the wolf, which fell asleep after his copious meal. The huntsman finds the wolf inside the house, understand that he might have eaten the girl and her grandmother, and opens his belly to extract both of them. In the end, the child promises she has learned the lesson as she says to herself “never again will you stray from the path and go into the woods when your mother has forbidden it” (20). Clearly, Little Red Cap could not act wisely because she did not understand the real importance of what her mother told her, just like children reading the story only remember the wolf deception, the hunter saving the little girl, and the happily ever after. They rarely absorb the moral of the story, which is to never trust strangers, as they might have bad intentions, and not to disobey your parents, who most of the time know better. Typically, children forget about what they have been told and pursue their interests, not seeing the risks nor dangers. Reading a fairytale is no different; it is like being told to follow a specific rule or to behave in a certain way, and very rarely it is enough for the child to remember the lesson and act accordingly. Through the metaverse, on the other hand, children can play the part of Little Red Cap themselves and they can feel the fear, can perceive the dismay and hopelessness when taken by the wolf, can understand the sadness when she figures out how much she risked just because she did not do as she was told. They will feel true happiness when saved and will respond to their mother’s reprimands with heavy souls. The beauty of immersive learning is that children could even play different roles. They would be experiencing the main character’s innocence and inexperience, then seeing how the wolf tries to take advantage of Little Red Cap’s naivety while being able to act as the huntsman who saves the young girl and the old lady. They would be able to feel all the emotions as if they were an active agent in the story.
Virtual reality increases the impact of a cautionary tale by stimulating parts of the brain that are inaccessible through film and language. The morals and lessons that cautionary tales represent and the significance they hold in children’s growth and maturation allow for fairy tales to be a suitable candidate to explore how immersive learning fosters understanding, retention, and ultimately behavioral change. Children as active participants rather than observers, experiencing the process of decision-making and its effects, entering each character and grasping their point of view and feelings will inevitably lead to the moral of the story having a greater impact on the child’s learning. The potential benefits of using the metaverse to teach children valuable lessons without putting them at risk are unlimited. When this possibility becomes a reality, it will lead to kids being able to better retain and learn valuable lessons.
