JOINclusion: A serious mobile game for promoting ethnocultural empathy in schools

This study examines the efficacy of JOINclusion, a serious mobile game designed to enhance ethnocultural empathy in children aged 8 to 12. Grounded in the Social Emotional Learning (SEL) framework, JOINclusion delivers interactive scenarios through a narrative-driven Story Mode and a collaborative Multiplayer Mode, encouraging emotional recognition, cognitive perspective-taking and prosocial decision-making. The game was evaluated using a pre-post design with 286 children across three European countries (Italy, Greece and the Netherlands). Two key outcomes were assessed: children's perceived educational benefit from the game and changes in ethnocultural empathy, specifically in empathic feeling/expression and perspective-taking. Findings indicated that most children reported perceived improvements in empathy-related skills after gameplay. Results from the pre- and post-comparison using Latent Change Score Models showed a significant increase in empathic perspective-taking and a marginal improvement in empathic feeling and expression. These effects were significant regardless of gender, age and migratory background. These findings support the potential of gamified learning experiences to foster inclusive social behaviour by promoting empathy-related competences. Despite its limitations, JOINclusion offers a promising, scalable model for integrating empathy training into diverse educational settings through engaging and child-centred technology.