Interactive Storytelling to Teach News Literacy to Children

In this information saturated era, one might argue that learning how to better recognize fake news, misinformation and disinformation are important skills to master. Not only that, but in a participatory paradigm, it seems useful for the user to learn certain journalistic skills. This is called news literacy. Some scholars have been researching the use of digital media to teach news literacy to teenagers and college students, in particular interactive storytelling and gaming. However, less is known about platforms for younger children. And yet a few of those platforms exist. This paper summarizes an ongoing doctoral research and presents preliminary results about the analysis of eight platforms aimed at teaching news literacy to children. We examined the lessons delivered and how interactive storytelling elements were incorporated. We make recommendations for the design of future interactive platforms to teach news literacy. Ultimately our work extends knowledge of how news literacy is being approached in interactive digital platforms and of how interactive storytelling can better be used to foster news literacy.