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Local media professionals and Learn to Check will co-create a scape room to encourage critical thinking among teenagers

La Xarxa and Learn to Check Association (LTC) are launching an escape room, a media education project that aims to train local media professionals and co-create with them an escape game about disinformation and digital verification. The initiative started on Thursday, January 29, and about thirty journalists from local radios and televisions participated.

In the first session of the project, professionals have been able to participate in a verification scape game designed by Learn to Check and that has included tests to evaluate sources and contrast photographs, among others. After the activity, the participating professionals have begun to co-design a digital verification scape room with Learn to Check team. This scape room will be adapted to local media and will be designed for students in the first cycle of ESO. In the next phase of the project, the materials that will be made available to XAL professionals will be worked on.

At the beginning of the day, Núria de José, the CEO of La Xarxa, highlighted “the importance of helping secondary school students and high schools identify fake news and fight against disinformation from the nearest media, the local media”. In addition, she underlined that “from La Xarxa and the local radios and fabrics it is assumed that this type of initiatives is fundamental to fight against disinformation, of which we are pioneers”.

In the first session of the project, local media professionals have participated with the aim of promoting critical thinking with information among adolescents and positioning The Network and local radios and fabrics as key agents to promote media and information literacy (AMI) from the local world. Other purposes are to train local media professionals in AMI and gamified methodologies and promote AMI with a local perspective.

The project is added to other measures that both La Xarxa and Learn to Check are carried out to promote media education. Learn to Check has extensive experience, both in the training of journalists and communication professionals in disinformation and AMI, as well as in the creation and application of digital verification scape rooms. Thus, in recent years, Learn to Check has trained more than 300 journalists through collaborations with the Association of Journalists of Catalonia, the Colexio de Xornalistas de Galicia, 3Cat, the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA), the Deutsche Welle Akademie and the bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Communication at different universities, such as the UAB, UPF, URV or UVic. Learn to Check is a non-profit association dedicated to media education and dissemination to create resilience in the face of disinformation and promote critical thinking with information. Since 2018, Learn to Check has directly trained more than 22,000 people on disinformation and digital verification and collaborates with more than 70 entities, including the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Ministry of Culture, the Barcelona Provincial Council, the Generalitat de Catalunya, Iberifier, and UNICEF Spain, among others.