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JEDi - a digital educational game to support student training in identifying portuguese-written fake news: Case studies in high school, undergraduate and graduate scenarios

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Abstract

The problem of propagating disinformation (a.k.a. fake news) on social media has increased significantly in the last few years. There are several initiatives around the world to combat this serious problem. Maybe the most promising ones involve training people to identify fake news. The use of digital educational games (DEG) to implement such initiatives has presented significant results. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, most of the existing DEG applied to this purpose are designed for English-written News articles, leaving an important gap for news written in other languages, such as Portuguese, for example. Faced with this scenario, this article presents JEDi, a DEG that trains students to identify fake news written in Portuguese. JEDi is a version of the known Trail Game where the players must traverse the board by correctly distinguishing real from false news. We raise the hypothesis that as the students play JEDi, they develop the ability to recognize disinformation. It is also important to highlight that JEDi collects detailed data from every match in order to provide longitudinal analyses of each player’s performance. This paper reports the application of JEDi in three case studies. While the first study involved 43 students from high school, the second and the third were developed with 29 undergraduate and 33 graduate students, respectively. Quantitative and qualitative results obtained in the three studies point to JEDi’s effectiveness as a fake news detection training instrument. Mining techniques such as association rule mining were employed in data analysis and revealed frequent information that occurred simultaneously in JEDi’s database (e.g. some mined association rules showed that even students who considered themselves experts in identifying fake news could improve their skills by playing successive rounds of the game).

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available at: https://memore-net.com/jogos/jedi/dataset/graduacao.csv (HE), https://memore-net.com/jogos/jedi/dataset/pos_graduacao.csv (GD) and https://memore-net.com/jogos/jedi/dataset/ensino_medio.csv (HS).

Game availability

For details, access JEDi https://memore-net.com/jogos/jedi/. Using the login: visitante and password: 123.

Notes

  1. www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

  2. http://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2020/06/02/nova-versao-de-lei-contra-fake-news-tera-restricoes-a-contas-anonimas-e-mais-poder-a-denuncias-de-usuarios

  3. In this article, the acronym DEG is being applied interchangeably to singular and plural forms of citation to digital educational games.

  4. Rumor is information that has not been verified as true or false when disclosed (Vosoughi et al., 2017).

  5. Sup(R) represents the support of the rule R (i.e., the frequency of data records that satisfy R w.r.t. the whole dataset). The parameter MinSup denotes Minimum Support. Hence, this condition states that a rule R is frequent iff its support is at least equal to MinSup.

  6. Conf(R) represents the confidence of the rule R (i.e., the frequency of data records that satisfy R w.r.t. the set of data records that satisfy X). The parameter MinConf denotes Minimum Confidence. Hence, this condition states that a rule R is valid iff its confidence is at least equal to MinConf.

  7. https://www.getbadnews.com/#play

  8. A collaborative learning support platform that offers resources to those interested in computer-supported education to share experiences, carry out teaching-learning practices, learn and improve pedagogical actions and policies in using information and communication technologies in the classroom (Passos et al., 2019). For details, access http://memore-net.com

  9. https://memore-net.com/jogos/jedi/

  10. Grupo Globo’s G1 portal

  11. Grupo Record’s R7 portal

  12. This calculation was based on an average number of twenty news to which students are presented in each match and a total of two matches, considering the database with 600 news used in this research.

  13. We used Apriori’s implementation available in the Scikit-learn library.

  14. This hypothesis is based on UNESCO’s belief that there is a relation between formal education and the ability to identify misinformation (UNESCO, 2016). According to the institution, people with higher literacy are less susceptible to fake news.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by CNPq (proc. 401662 / 2020-9) and by CAPES (student scholarship - proc. 88887.765311 / 2022-00, and visiting professor scholarship - proc. PROCAD-DEFESA-DRI 88881.853129 / 2023-01).

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Author notes

  1. Treice de Oliveira Moreira, Cláudio Azevedo Passos, Flávio Roberto Matias da Silva, Paulo Márcio Souza Freire, Isabel Fernandes de Souza, Cláudia Rödel Bosaipo Sales da Silva, and Ronaldo Ribeiro Goldschmidt contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IME, Military Institute of Engineering, Praça Gen. Tibúrcio nº80 - Urca, Rio de Janeiro, 22290-270, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Treice de Oliveira Moreira, Flávio Roberto Matias da Silva, Paulo Márcio Souza Freire, Cláudia Rödel Bosaipo Sales da Silva & Ronaldo Ribeiro Goldschmidt

  2. Pedro II, Colégio Pedro II, Campo de São Cristóvão, 177 - São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro, 20921-440, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Cláudio Azevedo Passos

  3. UniAmérica, Descomplica UniAmérica Centro Universitário, Av. das Cataratas, 1118 - Vila Yolanda, Foz do Iguaçu, 85853-000, Paraná, Brazil

    Isabel Fernandes de Souza

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Correspondence to Treice de Oliveira Moreira.

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Oliveira Moreira, T.d., Passos, C.A., Matias da Silva, F.R. et al. JEDi - a digital educational game to support student training in identifying portuguese-written fake news: Case studies in high school, undergraduate and graduate scenarios. Educ Inf Technol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12309-z

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