Game Critique: Interland — Be Internet Awesome
Critique Blog — Post 2 @Design Educational Games, Prof. Erik Harpstead, CMU
Game Metadata
- Game Name: Interland — Be Internet Awesome
- Designer/Developer: Google
- Platform: Web (Browser-based)
- High-level Instructional Goal: To teach children the fundamentals of digital citizenship and safety.
- Link to the Game: Play here
Educational Goals
Interland is an online game created as part of Google’s “Be Internet Awesome” initiative aimed at teaching 7–12-year-old children the fundamentals of digital citizenship and safety in an engaging and interactive way. The educational goals of Interland include helping kids understand important concepts such as how to recognize and avoid online threats (like phishing and malware), the importance of securing their personal information, understanding the concept of online reputation, and promoting kindness and positive interaction online.
The game is structured around four floating islands, Kind Kingdom, Reality River, Mindful Mountain, and Tower of Treasure, each focusing on a different lesson of internet safety with mini-games:
- Kind Kingdom: Aims to encourage positive behavior online, teaching children the importance of treating others with kindness and how to manage cyberbullies.
- Reality River: This part of the game emphasizes the skill of discerning real from fake information online and learning how to avoid and identify predators and hackers.
- Mindful Mountain: Focuses on teaching children the importance of sharing information with caution.
- Tower of Treasure: This section is designed to teach children about the importance of strong passwords and protecting personal data.
By navigating through these islands and facing various challenges, kids learn to apply the principles of digital citizenship in their daily internet use and foster safer and more responsible online behaviors.
Interland is crafted to accommodate children who have diverse amounts of knowledge regarding internet safety. Nonetheless, it does presuppose a foundational familiarity with basic internet skills, such as navigation through simple online games using directional arrow keys. Additionally, a rudimentary grasp of cybersecurity terminology, including terms like “cyberbullying” and “privacy,” is beneficial for players. In my view, the game would be more accessible (especially for Non-native English speakers) by offering more pre-training on these relevant concepts and terminologies.
The game’s four islands can be explored in any sequence. In the subsequent section, I will focus on Reality River Island, which emphasizes the identification of online phishing attempts and the protection of personal information.
Game Elements
Gameplay Loop
The core gameplay loop of Interland involves navigating four themed islands learning and applying internet safety concepts through challenges. The outer loop is to conquer all challenges across all four landscapes with a high score and reward certificates that demonstrate the player’s ability to engage in online activities safely. In the inner loop, players apply learned Internet safety skills to overcome different challenges and receive feedback.
In Reality River, players engage in a core gameplay loop that entails responding to questions aimed at distinguishing accurate information on the internet to navigate across the Reality River.
Nouns
The Nouns in Reality River are phisher, statements/questions, river, bridge, and score.
Verbs
The verbs in Reality River include evaluating, choosing an answer, jumping, falling into the water (if the answer is incorrect), and answering quiz questions.
Player Experience
In Reality River, players are immersed in an engaging environment where they’re tasked with the critical challenge of distinguishing between real and fake information. This interactive experience is designed to mimic real-life internet usage, where not everything presented as fact is true. Players learn to question and critically evaluate information before accepting it as true, enhancing their digital literacy skills. The feedback mechanism ensures that learning is integral to the gameplay, allowing players to understand their mistakes and correct misconceptions in real-time. This not only reinforces the educational content but also keeps the game engaging and informative, promoting a deeper understanding of the importance of scrutinizing online information.
Upon successfully navigating through all the challenges in Reality River, players are awarded a certificate recognizing them as an internet “Alert,” instilling a feeling of achievement.
Learning Mechanisms
This game in Reality River employs quizzing, feedback, anchored learning, and variability principles to facilitate Memory & Fluency, Induction & Refinement, and Sense-making & Understanding process. However, the game could incorporate a pretraining session to further bolster the player’s learning experience.
Quizzing
The quizzing principle in educational contexts refers to the strategy of using quizzes and questions to enhance learning and retention. The quizzing principle employed in Reality River enhances learning by promoting active engagement, where players must hypothesize, recall, and apply knowledge on internet safety, thus solidifying their understanding.
The quizzing in Reality River involves pre-exposing and re-exposing. During the gameplay, players are exposed to material they haven’t learned and need to make their own hypotheses to select the correct answer to cross the river.
At the end of the game, players will revisit the fundamental ideas of evaluating online information through fill-in-the-blank questions, complemented by engaging animations that underscore the lesson. This method solidifies their acquired knowledge.
Feedback
The feedback principle in educational settings emphasizes the importance of providing learners with information about their performance or understanding. Effective feedback helps learners understand what they are doing right, where they are going wrong, and how they can correct their mistakes. Providing feedback during learning was tested to have better learning outcomes than no feedback (Ken et al., 2013).
In Reality River, when players answer a question, they immediately see the impact on their scores; correct answers boost their scores, while incorrect ones result in the bridge vanishing, causing them to fall into the water. Feedback for wrong answers also comes with hints for more attempts. In the final quiz, players will also receive feedback on their performance, either positive or negative feedback with hints.
Implementing the feedback principle in Reality River effectively aids learning by offering direct, actionable insights into players’ choices, assisting in the identification and correction of errors, and strengthening the correct understanding of internet safety principles.
Anchored Learning
Anchored learning engages the player in realistic rather than theoretical problem-solving and emphasizes the connections between the game and the real world. Studies have shown that instruction with real-world problems yields better learning effects than instruction with abstract problems (Ken et al., 2013).
The content in quizzes in Reality River is tailored to 7–12-year-old children. The context of the questions is related to players’ real-life experiences. For example, “You see an ad for a real diamond bracelet that your grandma would love…”.
By integrating the anchored learning principle, Reality River effectively teaches important aspects of internet safety and digital citizenship in a way that is both impactful and memorable, preparing children to navigate the online world more safely and responsibly.
Variability
The variability principle adopts multiple and varied examples to teach and practice the use of abstract concepts. Practicing with varied instances has proved to be more effective than practicing similar instances (Ken et al., 2013).
In Reality River, every question comes with a different context or scenario for the player to practice how to discern fake information and protect privacy in the online world. The context varies from downloading online games, receiving scam emails, dealing with fake websites, etc.
Applying the Variability principle in Reality River enhances learning effectiveness by exposing players to a wide range of scenarios and challenges, which helps in generalizing internet safety skills to diverse real-world situations.
Pretraining (To improve)
The only drawback in the Reality River game is the lack of pretraining. The game only provides a simple instruction on how to navigate in this game, but it fails to expose players to any key concepts or knowledge in the game. Some vocabularies, such as “phishing” and “cyberbullying,” may be complicated to understand for 7–12-year-old children.
The benefit of the pretraining principle lies in preparing learners with foundational knowledge before tackling more complex topics, thereby facilitating easier understanding and more effective learning of advanced concepts. Practicing key prior skills before the lesson also leads to better learning outcomes than jumping into the content directly (Ken et al., 2013). In this game, pretraining can be incorporated at the beginning to familiarize players with some fundamental concepts and vocabulary and guide players to practice one or two questions.
Overall Critique
To conclude, Interland is an innovative and engaging educational game that serves as an excellent resource for teaching children about internet safety and digital citizenship. By weaving critical lessons into interactive gameplay across its diverse islands, it effectively captures young minds’ attention, making complex topics accessible and enjoyable to learn. The game’s design, which encourages exploration, problem-solving, and critical thinking, not only educates but also entertains, ensuring that players come away with a stronger understanding of how to navigate the online world safely and responsibly. The incorporation of real-life scenarios through game challenges helps reinforce the importance of privacy, kindness, and security online. Interland stands out as a valuable tool for parents and educators looking to instill safe internet habits in children, making it a commendable effort by Google to contribute positively to the digital well-being of the next generation.
References
- Koedinger, K. R., Booth, J. L., & Klahr, D. (2013). Instructional complexity and the science to constrain it. Science, 342(6161), 935–937.
- Harper, E. (n.d.). Interactive principles. https://eharpste.github.io/interactive-principles/#/