Happy onlife - A video game to support mediation on internet risks and opportunities

Abstract

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.

A Systematic Review of Multimedia Tools for Cybersecurity Awareness and Education

“…Data collected from realworld deployment of Anti-Phishing Phil showed that it is effective for knowledge acquisition and knowledge retention [97]. Other works like A Day in the Life of the Jos [106], Happy Onlife [26], and Digital Passport [38] have been distributed by government and non-profit organizations. These were validated in the lab [106], based on feedback [26], or in small pilot and beta tests [38].…”

“…Other works like A Day in the Life of the Jos [106], Happy Onlife [26], and Digital Passport [38] have been distributed by government and non-profit organizations. These were validated in the lab [106], based on feedback [26], or in small pilot and beta tests [38].…”

“…However, others [186] concluded that multimedia tools have limited uses as stand-alone educational resources, but may be very effective as a scaffolding tool to inspire deeper education, communication, and reflection. There is evidence that educational tools facilitate privacy discussions between children and adults [26,209].…”

“…12:28 L. Zhang-Kennedy and S. Chiasson Some researchers suggest that cybersecurity educational tools could effectively support discussion and mediation between players. For example, evaluations of four tabletop games [14,26,67,162] and an e-book created by us [209] similarly concluded that the tools encouraged discussion among players and may even act as a mediator between adults and children [26,162,209]. Children's educational tools should have a strong and engaging narrative [106,209,210], be age appropriate [106,209], provide realistic choices, and offer opportunities for reflection [106].…”

REN-A.I.: A Video Game for AI Security Education Leveraging Episodic Memory

“…Learning by video games has various benefits [8]: for instance, the motivation for learning is maintained; assignments can be given easily in accordance with the learner's understanding; and safe environments to enable users to learn by trial and error can be constructed. In the past decades, there are many games to learn cybersecurity (also known as serious game) [6], [28]- [36]. Users can learn how to attack and exploit vulnerabilities in a dynamic setting and how to react to the attacks by developing their countermeasures through games [6].…”