BAU and NYU Cooperation to Bring 'Hope' to Syrian Children

The results of the pilot study of "Project Hope," a joint project of Bahçeşehir University and New York University envisaging the use of computer games in the education of Syrian refugee children in Türkiye, were announced at a press conference held at Bahçeşehir University.

In Türkiye, which hosts the largest number of refugees in the world with more than 3 million registered Syrians, Bahçeşehir University (BAU) and New York University (NYU) designed an online, game-based learning application called "Project Hope" to help address the educational and psychological crisis of Syrian refugee children. The details of the project were shared with the public at a press conference held on Thursday, 22 June 2017, at the BAU Beşiktaş Campus by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sinem Vatanartıran, Director of the Bahçeşehir University Graduate School of Educational Sciences, and Prof. Dr. Selçuk Şirin, faculty member of the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University.

For the project, which aims to support refugee children through game-based education that develops Syrian refugee children's Turkish, executive skills and coding abilities while reducing their feelings of helplessness and increasing their hope, the researchers set up a pilot study group in Urfa, which is located on the Syrian border and hosts the largest refugee settlement in Türkiye. A total of 147 Syrian refugee children aged 9-14 participated in the pilot study.

Children in the intervention group took part in a special 40-hour program in two-hour daily sessions over four weeks. Within the scope of Project Hope, a special curriculum consisting of a combination of five games was implemented to measure the mental health and hope of refugee children, including Minecraft, Code.org with game-based programming instructions, an executive skills development game called Alien Game, and Cerego, which teaches Turkish and was developed by NYU and CUNY researchers.

Through weekly surveys, the refugee children were also asked how much they liked the games, how much they learned from them and whether they would recommend them. Generally satisfied, the students stated that they learned from the games and would recommend them.

Expressing their satisfaction with the education program delivered through games, the refugee children also showed progress in all targeted areas after the 4-week intervention:

- To improve their command of Turkish, refugee children were introduced to more than 200 Turkish words through the adaptive learning technology platform Cerego.

- The researchers also measured the children's executive skills, that is, their ability to plan, monitor and change behavior. In Project Hope, the children played the Alien game, designed to develop executive skills by teaching them to distinguish between different stimuli while rewarding short-term memory and quick reactions. After the intervention, the researchers observed a significant increase in the children's cognitive skills.

- As part of Project Hope, the children also learned "coding," cited as a crucial skill for the 21st century. The refugee children taking part in Project Hope through Code.org wrote more than 1,800 lines of code.

- For refugee children who are at risk in terms of mental health and often feel helpless and hopeless, tasks were created through the popular game Minecraft to encourage them to imagine a better future for themselves. These tasks required the children to build the home, neighborhood and school of their dreams. By measuring the children's hopelessness before and after Project Hope, the researchers showed that the intervention significantly reduced the children's sense of hopelessness.

Stating that the biggest problem of Syrian children is language, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sinem Vatanartıran, Director of the Bahçeşehir University Graduate School of Educational Sciences, said: "Our pilot study shows that using game-based learning is an effective and low-cost way to teach refugee children important skills. Refugee children need to learn Turkish for integration. We must reach more Syrian students to teach Turkish and improve the quality of the education they receive. Project Hope is a study created to achieve this."

Prof. Dr. Selçuk Şirin, faculty member at New York University and one of the researchers of Project Hope, emphasized that 44 percent of Syrian refugee children were found to be at risk of depression and 20 percent to be depressed, and said: "Our hope is that the results of this study show that, despite limited resources and language barriers, we can make a difference in the lives of these children with developing technology."