Towards a scenario of virtual mental health environments for school-aged children

Abstract

This study explores student teachers’ future design scenarios focusing on promoting children’s mental health literacy through virtual reality (VR) environments. VR use is on the verge of many breakthroughs in several areas of lived experience. One such area pertains to educational contexts. Student teachers were chosen as the subjects of this study due to the likelihood that they will be the primary users and disseminators of these emerging technologies in educational contexts. The students created five types of future scenarios that contained different environments and activity modes, including those that are still not yet feasible to realize with current technological capabilities. The aims students set for the VR worlds were closely in-line with the transversal competences defined in the Finnish curriculum framework. They also reflected many topics of mental health learning.