A Gamified Platform to Support Educational Activities About Fake News in Social Media

The amount of news on the web often confuses the ideas of the reader, who struggles to disentangle information that is sometimes contradictory and difficult to decipher. In the face of such an articulated scenario, the role played by schools is absolutely central: the development of critical thinking in young people (and by extension in their families) is a necessary condition for facing the complexity of the reality with the right awareness and control. Providing young people with a thorough understanding of the fake news spreading phenomenon is a first step in combating it. To this end, in this article, we propose a serious game whose objective is to let young people experience the typical interaction scenario when faced to a feed of real and fake news in social media. Our proposal focuses on educational workshops, carried out in secondary schools and dedicated to the correct use of information on the web, with particular attention to logical fallacies and cognitive bias mechanisms that lead to the formulation of erroneous reasoning or prevent a comparison from progressing logically. Thanks to an intuitive interface that helps the teacher supervise the whole game session, the students are invited to assess the truthfulness of a small set of news at different levels and to share them with their friends. At the end of the game session, the teacher is provided with an interactive detailed report of the activities that enables the analysis of all participants' actions and behavior. The teacher can use such a report to conduct a classroom lecture in a more engaging and interactive way, by stimulating discussions among the students and raising their curiosity on the subject. Our educational platform has been tested accurately in a broad experimental study involving 217 middle school students. The results show the suitability of the platform in providing a valuable educational tool for supporting educational activities on fake news analysis.