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. The objective of this project 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.

Describe the strategy

[ A perfect time to learn digital literacy is when they first learn to type ] Children around 10 to 12 years old start to actively express their own opinion in public. Also, the school-age children in Korea mater the typing skill for the computer education sessions, and we found the opportunity at this point: Using typing game interface for digital literary education. The very first moment when children learn to input their message with their clumsy typing hands is the best timing for disciplining Internet courtesy and educating about media literacy to our children. With <TYPING HERO>, children can master the typing skill, while learning the act wise to deal with the internet trolls and fake news with the whimsically interesting stories.

Describe the execution

To make education this 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 on the analyzed massive data of malicious internet comments. 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. We ran multiple advisory sessions with digital literacy experts and primary school educators to build storylines in which children can learn how they wisely deal with the various types of Internet trolling, for example, you need to avoid unreasonably hostile comments by clicking the report button, and you can fact-check the fake news by three steps: check the source, check if making sense, and not spreading unverified information.

List the results

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, compared to the comparison group. By this result, we could find out our project could positively work as a digital literacy education tool, as we planned. Also, <TYPING HERO>has gotten great reviews from kid YouTubers and digital literacy educator group, and a Korean web portal site <Junior Naver>admire the value of our project and sponsored the banner ad spot for promotion.