[Job] Design a game about news media literacy for kids. What would you do?
One of the briefs that's found its way to me this past week is from Media Monitoring Africa, which runs workshops with children to increase their news literacy and engagement. They're also talking the Mail & Guardian about this, so consider them as a possible resource... To summarise, the brief has a couple of goals:
1. Increase the engagement with and understanding of news media by children, including the idea that news is a choice at all levels, it's not just a service provided as-is.
2. Give news media reasons to depict children as more than just secondary mentions in news articles and potentially increase the market for news consumption accordingly.
3. Allow more children to be reached with this sort of knowledge than are within the immediate physical vicinity of the MMA offices, so bonus points for it being a non-curated or easily-forked system.
I'm not sure of the budget, timescale or target platforms for this concept, but the brief itself is attached to this post. Please follow up with William via williamb@mma.org.za if you'd like to know more.
So now for the interesting part: What would you do, given this sort of design constraint? How would you make an interesting game from this brief? I sat down with @Aequitas and we came up with the following ideas:
-Build a quiz authoring system that provides different sorts of points and progress to players who set quizzes and those who answer them correctly. Obviously quizzes would have to be based on news media available to everyone in a school or setting.
-Allow kids to build a "newspaper" from RSS feed entries. They'd be able to change images and write their own headlines to suit the type of story they're going for. Important things here are a limit to the number of stories they can display and additional goals like "Make everyone that reads your paper depressed" or "Not enough people are buying the paper, we need more eyeballs, be more provocative" that's a little sinister maybe, but it would help with news comprehension bigtime.
-Partner local news sites to allow teachers to create custom comment sections where kids could comment on news stories with only their school peers and classmates. This removes the general internet derpness from comment threads so that kids can interact meaningfully with news content on local sites - provided there's impetus from teachers to do so.
-Not super keen on the idea of mini-games, but a couple have popped up: Find the spelling error; Rewrite that headline for maximum lulz/grip/return/emotion/manipulation; Caption the news image/insert images into your news for maximum lulz/grip/.../etc.
No idea how these things would be monetized, nor am I totally certain they're the sorts of things that the MMA is looking for. Just spitballing here... Feel free to add your own ideas and/or chat to William about what they need in terms of game design and production. William is rather keen to talk to potential designers and work towards something that will be interesting and fun :)
1. Increase the engagement with and understanding of news media by children, including the idea that news is a choice at all levels, it's not just a service provided as-is.
2. Give news media reasons to depict children as more than just secondary mentions in news articles and potentially increase the market for news consumption accordingly.
3. Allow more children to be reached with this sort of knowledge than are within the immediate physical vicinity of the MMA offices, so bonus points for it being a non-curated or easily-forked system.
I'm not sure of the budget, timescale or target platforms for this concept, but the brief itself is attached to this post. Please follow up with William via williamb@mma.org.za if you'd like to know more.
So now for the interesting part: What would you do, given this sort of design constraint? How would you make an interesting game from this brief? I sat down with @Aequitas and we came up with the following ideas:
-Build a quiz authoring system that provides different sorts of points and progress to players who set quizzes and those who answer them correctly. Obviously quizzes would have to be based on news media available to everyone in a school or setting.
-Allow kids to build a "newspaper" from RSS feed entries. They'd be able to change images and write their own headlines to suit the type of story they're going for. Important things here are a limit to the number of stories they can display and additional goals like "Make everyone that reads your paper depressed" or "Not enough people are buying the paper, we need more eyeballs, be more provocative" that's a little sinister maybe, but it would help with news comprehension bigtime.
-Partner local news sites to allow teachers to create custom comment sections where kids could comment on news stories with only their school peers and classmates. This removes the general internet derpness from comment threads so that kids can interact meaningfully with news content on local sites - provided there's impetus from teachers to do so.
-Not super keen on the idea of mini-games, but a couple have popped up: Find the spelling error; Rewrite that headline for maximum lulz/grip/return/emotion/manipulation; Caption the news image/insert images into your news for maximum lulz/grip/.../etc.
No idea how these things would be monetized, nor am I totally certain they're the sorts of things that the MMA is looking for. Just spitballing here... Feel free to add your own ideas and/or chat to William about what they need in terms of game design and production. William is rather keen to talk to potential designers and work towards something that will be interesting and fun :)
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MMA_News_game_Note_V8_summary.doc
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