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Welcome to eCUTE

The eCUTE project is working to develop an innovative technological application to aid cultural understanding and empathy in children and young adults.      eCUTE uses a view of culture based on the 6 Cultural Dimensions defined by Geert Hofstede and  Bennetts developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.

The project will:

  • Develop pedagogical approaches to education in cultural understanding grounded in psychological and educational theory
  • Create believable cultural learning scenarios based on theoretical approaches that connect with the experiences of the target learner groups
  • To establish an operational parameterisation of theoretically derived cultural behaviour and use it to create synthetic cultures and characters that behave as if they live within such cultures
  • Develop expressive behaviour for synthetic characters that is culturally appropriate
  • Create two cultural Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), one for late-primary children and the other for young adults based on virtual dramas using synthetic characters with culturally-specific interaction behaviour
  • Evaluate the created systems with stakeholder, teacher and learner groups, demonstrating the learning efficacy of the  showcases with the intention of leveraging further funding and commercial opportunities.

eCUTE is a project funded by Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (FP7)