Role Playing and Perspective Taking: An Educational Point of View

The rationale of this work combines the concepts of role playing and storytelling in the creation of an interactive virtual environment aimed at assessing and training students’ perspective taking skill, or the ability of students in primary and secondary level to take the point of view of the characters of a narrative. The ability to take the perspective of others is extremely important from the cognitive point of view. Piaget has suggested that the moment we abandon the egocentric perspective in favor of the ability to take another point of view, takes place not earlier than seven years of age. Subsequent researches challenged the findings of Piaget. For this reason, the project will address children in the last years of primary school (aged 8-10) and the first level of secondary school (aged 11-13). From 8 years old then, in fact, the child, in the opinion of many researchers who have addressed this issue, should be out of the egocentric stage and should have acquired the skill of perspective taking. The goal of current stage is to create a tool that allows the students to take the point of view of the characters in a story and to make choices in the narrative, which are consistent with the role of the character played.