Background

South Korea has a major social problem with Internet trolls and fake news. Ever since the COVID-19 lockdown began, children’s internet screen time has dramatically increased. However, there is no proper digital literacy education program to protect children from the negative side of the internet. Our goal is to create an online educational tool that teaches children how to deal with internet trolls and fake news to be a healthy digital citizen. We built a web-based interactive educational game <TYPING HERO> optimized for homeschoolers during the pandemic. The budget for building an interactive web game which also includes 3-D character design, UX/UI, motion graphics was approximately $70,000.

Describe the creative idea (40% of vote)

We specifically target primary school kids around 10 to 12 years old, who start to actively express their own opinion in public. And that’s the age group learning to master typing skills at school. So, we found an opportunity for this specific target group: Using typing game interface for digital literary education. Children can master the typing skill while playing the game and learn to act wise dealing with internet trolls and fake news. While playing <TYPING HERO>, children will have to clear multiple stages and run into the 7 trolls that represent the 7 different types of Internet negativities kids need to know how to manage. Once they clear out all stages, they will be entitled as a “Typing Hero” and get a license to be an Internet citizen with their name on it. With this souvenir, children will remind the lessons and who they promised to be.

Describe the execution (40% of vote)

To make education the content visually interesting and appealing, we created a virtual world that represents the most popular platforms such as social media, news, and video channels. Seven different internet troll 3-D characters were designed based on7 different types of Internet negativities based on the analyzed massive data of malicious internet comments. It is our hands and fingertips that produce good and bad comments on the Internet. Thus, the design motif for 3-D characters was a form of the human hand and characterized them all differently based on their unique traits, with the whimsically customized prop objects for the game stages. To build a more persuasive storyline, we ran multiple advisory sessions with digital literacy experts and primary school educators. Plus, as a part of the pilot program, the selected group of 40 students participate in the beta-testing of <TYPING HERO> to improve the user experience of this content.

List the results (20% of vote)

After the 6 months of development, <TYPING HERO> was launched on Nov. 1, 2020, within the first 6 weeks, it was played more than 62,000 times and it is still counting. To measure the audiences’ awareness change after this game, we surveyed a total of 200 children, and the experimental group who have played <TYPING HERO> responded that they felt 128% more confident to deal with Internet trolls and fake news, as opposed to the comparison group. With this result, we could find out our project could positively work as a digital literacy education tool, as we planned.