Next ANNIE Connect: Ray's Blog — an immersive online game to learn fact-checking techniques

Ray's blog is a sleek, sophisticated gamification effort — arguably the most entertaining and engaging among other educational games we played in this space.

A Happy New Year! I hope you’re getting off to a good start in 2024!

For us, it is going to be a busy year with two key projects — ANNIE School Net (school-based fact-checking newsroom projects with 16 educational organizations in 7 Asian countries) and our increasing effort in tackling public health misinformation with experts in the medical sector and beyond.

In our first monthly gathering on Jan. 19 (10:30-11:30 GMT+8), we will have guest speakers from Japan’s Classroom Adventure. They will demonstrate their online game called Ray’s Blog. Many of us (me and a few ANNIE Advisory Council members) played it together last month, and we were impressed with its design.

The engaging storyline naturally nudges players to use various online tools to find information, investigate claims, and check the veracity of various data — all essential skills in fact-checking — while solving the mystery, ‘who is Ray?’

Classroom Adventure is a startup founded by university students, and the game clearly shows. In my opinion, it resonates with our students’ generations unlike some other gaming efforts I have seen in this space.

Interested? The embedded clip below is a 5-minute preview of what’s coming in our meeting. Some parts of the video are in Japanese, but you can turn the subtitles on. Their demonstration will be in English, and as you can see in the video, the entire game is also in English.

Just in case, here’s the registration link (if you haven’t done so yet, that is).

https://hku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rcuuvqzspGNBeY11cN6QZG8X6WIuVxhCO

Have a good weekend, and see you online on Jan. 19 (10:30-11:30 GMT+8)!