This study investigates the role played by parents as mediators of young children's access and engagement with digital technologies. In Belgium, Germany, Latvia and Portugal, qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 families in each country, including one child between 6 and 7 years old. Our findings show that parents of young children mainly play the role of 'gatekeepers' when it comes to facilitating and constraining access to and use of digital technologies. Parents' perceptions of the efficacy of digital technologies as responsible entertainment and as educational tools influence the technologies available at home and

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Children and young people are very active users of digital technology from an early age. Recent research shows that children learn quickly from mirroring the behaviour of parents, of older siblings and peers. On the one hand, children have acquired independency and skills within the digital world; on the other, they lack reflective and critical thinking as well as awareness about opportunities and risks such as cyber-bullying or digital identity theft. Active adult's mediation would allow for the integration of values and critical thinking but so far, adults seem poor active mediators and in need of practical tools of empowerment. Therefore, we developed Happy Onlife, a game to support players towards a happy online life. This interactive video game aims at empowering teachers and parents to actively guide children to become smarter, responsible, and respectful when using digital media. We chose an experimental and empirical approach and the design of the game repeatedly undertook the elicitation, representation and validation steps. Happy Onlife presents key messages about children's use, overuse, and risks of misuse of digital technologies and provides simple and clear strategies of prevention, mediation or remediation. Tests beds have proved the efficiency of the video game's questions to prompt discussion between generations and to drives the players towards a responsible and safe digital media use. Happy Onlife can be considered as an effective tool to support adults' mediation to children for a healthy and safe internet and digital technology use.

This paper describes the participatory approach chosen to develop and evaluate a new serious game called Cyber Chronix developed in the format of a digital comic strip with storytelling branches. The aim of the story entitled "Finding Data" is to raise awareness about the privacy risks and the data protection rights in the new European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), whilst delivering a pleasant and enjoyable experience. In the evaluation phase, students acted as assessors with the assignment of looking at the key factors contributing to engage in reading, to enhance curiosity and to raise awareness of EU GDPR concepts. Here we report on how students perceived the different dimensions of the story and how the game can help to disseminate knowledge of EU GDPR rights and raise awareness of privacy risks.