Can immersion in virtual reality help combat opioid addiction?

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom, STEM clubs and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 Psychology.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Noah Robinson, a clinical psychology PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University in the USA. He is investigating how cognitive behavioural therapy techniques can be delivered through virtual reality environments, by non-professional coaches, to help people overcome their addiction to opioids.

• This resource also contains an interview with Noah. If your students have questions for Noah, they can send them to him online. All they need to do is to go to the article online (see the Futurum link below), scroll down to the end and type in the question(s). Noah will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Noah’s research and challenges them to design their own experiment to test the effectiveness of strategies to improve someone’s mood.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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