It is a perfect tool to be used on the context of NML's skills. VFT involves play, performance, simulation, appropriation, collective intelligence, judgment, networking and navigation (for complete definition click here).

Play and performance are the core activities and skills of any theater improvisation. During both stages of Improv and Creating the Digital Play, the participants are experimenting with their surroundings and trying to determine the best way to portray their ideas and emotions. Their series of performances (improvisations) are like simulations of the real situation they are trying to capture in their script and involves taking on different personas for the purpose of discovery and adjustment. The appropriation of their script happens during the process of rehearsal and finalizes itself when they finish the digital play. Once they post their virtual play, they are ready to invite others to interact with it to offer other solutions to their quest. They know peers and perhaps strangers will be changing their creation as a result, producing new versions of their play and engaging in a process of appropriation of the new VFT play. The VFT's original playwrights welcome networking and negotiation in the context of their VFT play. They know that negotiation is key when interacting and proposing different solutions for an issue that might be foreign to a given community or group; that there is a need to discern and respect multiple perspectives. They are not aware that this process involves collective intelligence as it really requires "the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal", but this is a great point to explore when working with teenagers on the creation of VFT plays.

Judgment is a skill that is practiced throughout the process of creation and interaction within a given VFT performance. By definition VFT's plays exploit an unresolved issue or an issue that requires a solution. The creators of a VFT performance are looking for solutions different from their own (if they have one) or looking for a solution to the problem they are posting. Judgment of the situation is a core skill required to analyze and try out a solution, but at the same time is a skill that requires practice to develop and VFT provides a safe learning environment for it to flourish. Once someone changes the action of an existing play, and remixing it into a new one, there is room for new judgments and negotiations, generating an intermingled and iterative process.

In fact all the skills sited above can be improved as a group of teens use VFT and engage in the full process of creation and collaborative virtual performance or virtual chatting.

Several examples of appropriation and remix happened during my research. Groups created the same sketch giving a different solution but using themselves as the characters, so it meant another version of the same VFT performance. Another group decided to create a different plot (story) around the same issue, therefore another VFT performance emerged. Examples of plots were discrimination of students of public schools by sales people at shopping malls, as well as gender and skin color discriminations; animosity in the public high school classrooms among cliques (the shoppers (frivolity) groups, the academic ones, the political ones, the ones who do drugs, etc); issues of noise and trash pollutions on the poor neighborhoods of the city where neighbors do not collaborate with each other at all.

More on VFT research and how to use it with children and teenagers, please see my thesis or papers at http://web.media.mit.edu/~mello/research.htm.

 High School Students using VFT