Escape the Fake: Development and evaluation of an augmented reality escape room game for fighting fake news

Abstract

Today's digital natives easily master new devices, but there is a greater need to provide them with a strong foundation of attitudes, skills and values to interpret the world around them. Moreover, in the context of remote schooling, providing students with opportunities to learn outside of the classroom and in an interactive manner is equally important. In this article, we address these issues by providing an account of Escape Fake, an augmented reality (AR) escape room game for educating young people about fake news. We show how such a game can be designed for playing at home, thereby providing interactive learning opportunities remotely. We discuss how to teach information literacy, by introducing the design process and gameplay of Escape Fake. In our evaluation with teenagers and young adults (n=49), we investigated the flow experience, attitude towards learning effectiveness and interest in learning with an AR escape game. Escape Fake was very well accepted by youth, who are willing to play the game in their free time. These results provide considerations for educators, researchers and designers who develop educational content by means of AR escape rooms.