News Literacy Education Using Escape Fake: Evaluating Adolescents’ Experiences with a Serious AR Escape Game in Hong Kong and Germany

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Empowering youth for a digital future: civic dialogue, news literacy, and collective action in global classrooms

Proposal

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant challenge to citizens’ independent reasoning, critical thinking, and civic engagement. Unverified information disseminated on digital media platforms can destabilize societies, erode trust in media institutions, and contribute to the polarization of public discourse. These risks are increasingly recognized in civic and educational frameworks, which emphasize the need to equip people with competencies to critically, conscientiously, and responsibly evaluate, verify, and consume media information before sharing it. However, existing research consistently shows that adolescents often lack the awareness and verification skills required to meet these demands. Meanwhile, their intensive engagement with digital media platforms makes adolescents particularly vulnerable to misleading content, raising the urgent need for effective educational strategies.
Despite this urgency, systematic research on innovative educational approaches—particularly those that go beyond traditional classroom instruction—remains limited. Yet, in debates around media literacy, and more specifically on news literacy, these challenges are increasingly discussed beyond just media literacy as aspects of ‘digital citizenship’ and essential considerations for civic education. Within these frameworks, promoting news literacy— typically defined as knowledge about the production, distribution, and consumption of news—requires not only the technical skills to verify news but also critical awareness and analytical thinking skills in relation to media content.
One innovative approach to address these issues has focused on ‘inoculation games,’ such as Bad News, Harmony Square, or Go Viral!, which expose players to minimal doses of misinformation and manipulation strategies to strengthen psychological resistance. While these are promising, inoculation games typically rely on textual interaction, with no integration of collaborative elements (e.g., collaborative problem-solving) and limited immersive narratives. An alternative may be escape games, as an emerging format of serious games, which provide an innovative approach by embedding puzzle-based, collaborative problem-solving within an immersive narrative/story. Thereby, escape games provide scaffolding for critical reflection and collaborative problem-solving in ways that traditional instruction often cannot offer.
We argue that escape games are a promising tool to engage adolescent students in authentic, cognitively challenging learning experiences. While escape games have been insufficiently implemented and barely empirically investigated in the context of news literacy interventions and civic education research, they may help educators in responding to the need for innovative educational strategies. Our study takes a student-centered approach to explore how adolescents in Hong Kong and Germany evaluate their gameplay experiences with Escape Fake, a serious AR (augmented reality) escape game, and its perceived potentials for promoting news literacy. We focus on these societies to examine the potentials of an escape game in two dissimilar educational contexts, one where education is often more student-centered and influenced by constructivist principles, and the other where rote learning and direct instruction are more prevalent. Against these backdrops, this study addresses four questions: (a) How do adolescent players experience the escape game? (b) What suggestions do adolescent players make for supporting learning through gameplay? (c) In what ways does Escape Fake contribute to adolescent players knowledge, attitudes, and cognitive skills related to news literacy? (d) What differences in adolescents’ game-play experiences and perceptions exist between both contexts?
Data were collected through several game sessions with adolescent students in Hong Kong and Germany, respectively followed by focus group interviews with 21 adolescents and over 200 responses to survey questionnaires (including closed and open-ended questions). Students’ qualitative responses and feedback in both contexts were transcribed, translated where necessary, and thematically analyzed. The cross-cultural analysis demonstrates that Escape Fake can engage adolescents in both Hong Kong and Germany in meaningful learning about fake news. Across both settings, adolescents valued the novelty, excitement, and cognitive stimulation of puzzle-based gameplay, while also calling for clearer instructions, structured debriefings, and more balanced task difficulties—thus, highlighting the need for scaffolding to connect play with learning. Contextual differences were also apparent: Students in Germany highlighted functionality and competitiveness, while students in Hong Kong emphasized language barriers and the physical demands of gameplay (e.g., holding an iPad). These contrasts illustrate how local educational and technological conditions may mediate the effects of employing serious games as tools for civic and news literacy education.
In conclusion, our findings indicate that while serious games can be promising for developing news literacy, their success depends on careful localization, elaborated learning design, and cultural adaptation. In particular, scaffolding needs to be localized. For instance, serious games such as Escape Fake can be more effective when embedded in guided learning environments that include teachers’ explanations, guidance, debriefings, or opportunities to connect gameplay with broader concepts and real-world manifestations of news literacy. Overall, the study contributes comparative insights based on empirical evidence into how adolescents perceive and learn from a serious AR escape game about fake news, while also providing design recommendations and pointing to future research on long-term learning effects, cross-cultural adaptation, and the integration of serious games into civic education or media education curricula.

Authors

• Jun Xie

• Natalie Grobshäuser, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main

• Monika Oberle, Goethe-University Frankfurt

• Frank Reichert, University of Hong Kong