Abstract
During the last years, there has been a growing multidisciplinary interest in alternative educational approaches, such as serious games, aiming at enhancing thinking skills and media literacy. Likewise, the objective of this study is to present the design and the development of an educational web application for learning the necessary steps towards the detection of bogus content, according to the fact-checking procedures. The game presents news articles, which have to be characterized as fake or real by the players. During the effort to reach the correct decision, the players can use tools and practices for identifying relevant information regarding the clues, which frame a news story (title, date, creator, source, containing images). After presenting the progress of interface design and development, this paper reports the results of a randomized online field study (n = 111), which provides some preliminary evidence. Specifically, it is validated that the game can raise awareness, teach about authentication tools, and highlight the importance of patterns that include evidence regarding the authenticity of articles. Additionally, thorough discussion was conducted within a media class (n = 35) to receive useful feedback/evaluation about the offered utilities and their usability. The findings suggest that educational games may be a promising vehicle to inoculate the public against misinformation.
Highlights
The knowledge and the means to acquire and analyze it are exceptionally vital in any aspect of human life
The application production was completed in 6 months, following five main phases, which are analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation, according to the instructional systems design (ISD) framework, known as ADDIE model, which is an acronym for the five phases it defines for building training and performance support tools [37]
The design phase is about preparing the scenarios and their educational content, the verification tools, and the overall user experience (UX), setting up the associated design layout
Summary
The knowledge and the means to acquire and analyze it are exceptionally vital in any aspect of human life. Learning paths should always be evolving, mainly because web-based knowledge have flooded online reality, and people face difficulties to evaluate it. Widespread misinformation on the Internet is a consequence of the above challenge in information evaluation and makes everyone suspicious or prone to debate everything [1]. Content that is entirely false is manipulated to look like a real journalistic report and fake headlines go viral [2]. These posts usually have powerful symbolism so that people are encouraged to share them. Creators of content, in an effort to increase their profitability, support the reproduction of false materials, which most of the time, cause much more reactions than ordinary news (emotional, political, etc.) [3]
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