MAthE the Game: A Serious Game for Education and Training in News Verification

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.

Technology-Enhanced Learning and Teaching Methodologies through Audiovisual Media

“…The modern approaches in teaching methodologies, based on the literature (theoretical and bibliographic) of recent decades [73][74][75] and in already published (new) researches and reviews in education [42,43,[76][77][78][79], as well as the field of media studies [40,[80][81][82][83], are:…”

A serious game to improve engagement with web accessibility guidelines

“…Recent research on serious games has expanded into areas such as healthcare and rehabilitation (Cargnin et al, 2015;Meijer et al, 2018), environment (Aubert et al, 2018), military (DeFalco et al, 2018;McGregor et al, 2016), education and training (Katsaounidou et al, 2019;Lamb et al, 2018), and decision making (Daylamani-Zad et al, 2018, 2016Flood et al, 2018). Research has also demonstrated many examples of serious games being used for increasing engagement.…”

Priorización De Competencias Ciudadanas en Un Contexto Gamificado

“…La gamificación surge como una solución alterna a las metodologías tradicionales educativas, percibidas por los estudiantes como aburridas e ineficaces. Esta nueva propuesta se caracteriza por motivar, aumentar el compromiso y reforzar el conocimiento de los estudiantes, mientras ofrece entretenimiento (Katsaounidou, Vrysis, Kotsakis, Dimoulas, & Veglis, 2019). Sin embargo, esta es relativamente joven, ya que el primer uso documentado de esta data de 2008, por lo que algunos autores son escépticos respecto a la efectividad de la misma (Kim, 2015).…”