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An Experimental Program Is Using Science Fiction to Teach Kids Radical Empathy Online
A complex game within a game invites kids to think about how they’d interact with other children in the future.
The video opens on a young girl with shiny hair and a big smile sitting at a table with a box in front of her. The setup is similar to that of any unboxing video, in which YouTubers open packages and discuss the contents for the entertainment of their subscribers. This video is different, though; the item in the package doesn’t really exist — at least, not yet.
I watch as the girl removes two items: a pink wristband that looks kind of like a Fitbit activity tracker, and a matching headset that reminds me of the headphones I used to wear to listen to my portable CD player. The FeelThat system, the girl explains, will detect changes in her hormones and analyze her voice for emotion. When she’s ready, she can switch a privacy setting on the device to “public” and it will transmit her actual feelings — not just information about them — to her connections on a network of other FeelThat users.
She seems a little nervous as she gets set up to try the system, but the overall tone of the video is excitement. The Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Palo Alto think tank, created the scenario as part of an online multiplayer game called Face the Future, developed to teach middle and high school students to think critically about the impact of technology on their lives, now and in the future. The game, which launched just after the 2016 presidential election, asked players to imagine a future in which a device like the FeelThat has become as commonplace as a smartphone. “Who would you share your FeelThat data with?” the game asked. “Whose data would you want to see?”
When Calee Prindle, then a ninth-grade English teacher at the Facing History School in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, queued up the FeelThat video to show her class, many of her students were feeling vulnerable. The presidential campaign and election had been emotionally stressful for the school’s diverse student body; many felt personally threatened by the rhetoric and policy proposals of newly elected President Donald Trump. Prindle told me that she had…
