Viral Sphere is a short simulative game, illustrating how daily sharing
of content among young people can typically work.
More specifically the game focuses on showing how innocent daily posting
activity, not directly motivated by ill intention related to bullism,
can generate negative response, which can result in unnecessary conflicts.
Moreover, the game wants to show how easy it is to lose control of
personal content shared among friend. Once shared the content can reach
unknown people and be easily misunderstood or willingly misused by others.
The game is aimed at fostering a dialogue between teachers and students on
GDPR laws and risks with sharing content online. For this reason the game
is not self-explanatory but rather it is thought as a tool to be handled by
the teachers to complement already available teaching materials and tools.
Spadatas learning scenario:
Viral Sphere is part of the Spadatas project and the Spadatas digital suite
to support schools in integrating GDPR in their teaching and learning practice.
The Spadatas suite includes two main tools:
- The self-evaluation questionnaires
- The Viral Sphere game
Self-evaluation questionnaires
The self-evaluation questionnaires is a resource for the school, presenting
multiple-choice and open questions, which require only a few minutes to fill.
These questionnaires are aimed at supporting teachers and other school staff
to become aware of their level of confidence with implementing GDPR in their
daily practices at their school. At the same time, the questionnaires are
supposed to provide school principals with an overview on how the school
staff, and in particular teachers, perceive their ability to implementing GDPR
correctly and in which aspects they might need support, for instance to
arrange training initiatives or to discuss new possible practices in
the school.
Viral Sphere
The game Viral Sphere is instead a resource for the classroom. It is intended
to be used by teachers to discuss issues related to GDPR, providing a narrative
grounding to the discussion, based on actual data gathered through our design
process. This narrative grounding is aimed at enabling students to concretely
reflect on:
- Their attitudes towards sharing personal content with their friends
- How sharing personal and innocent content involving others could
lead to unnecessary conflicts
- Present the students with realistic cases to which they can relate
- How easily anybody can lose control of shared content, once it has
been put online
- And finally to avoid falling into commoon sense vague recommendation
and preaching
How to use Viral Sphere
The game is supposed to be used as a tool in the hands of the teachers.
The game requires circa 10 minutes to be played and it can be used as an
addition to a regular lecture on GDPR:
- Integrated approach - Teachers have probably presented the notion of GDPR through readings
videos or other material
- Guided or independent play - Teachers can either present the game step by step addressing questions
to the students before letting them play or let them play and ask questions afterwards or as homework
- Awareness - Topics emerging in the game are about raising awareness on the risk of data sharing,
difference between personal or sensitive data and related grey area, unpredictable consequences
for sharing content involving other people
- Co-design - After the students have played, the teachers are invited to ask the students about
which improvements they would bring to the game to make it more relevant to themselves or their
younger siblings or classmates, this will encourage them to reflect critically on the game content
and then on what they themselves would recommend less experienced kids, making the game more
effective
- Relation - Teachers are invited to ask the students to recall similar cases that have
exeprienced themselves or heard from friends or the media, and to create images/storyboards of
these stories as if they had to add them to the game, this will add further to the critical
dimension of the game, so that it can become a more effective learning tool
- Creativity - Teachers are of course encouraged to reframe the use of the game according to their
needs and interests as they best know their students
We thank you for your attention and we hope you could find our software suite as a valuable tool.
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