Media represent a crucial part of everyday communication and have become a time and lifestyle imperative, so the students, journalists and educators of the future must be able to understand and correctly evaluate information from a variety of media sources. It is crucial to approach media literacy as a skill that requires continuous improvement, as algorithms become increasingly complex and the companies that employ them increasingly hide their capabilities.
Media-literate people are therefore better able to analyse information sources critically, separate fact from fiction and identify biases. Being able to differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources is crucial in today’s digital age, as information is widely available and easy to obtain.
For us Ikigai Institute, participating in the MEDIA MASTERS project is to ensure that we participate in the fight against disinformation and misinformation, which is in line with the EU Action Plan against disinformation, in an attempt to raise awareness and improve the resilience of societies.
On Ikigai Institute’s side, MEDIA MASTERS will ensure that children in the nine participating countries can continue to engage with it and, in the future, across the continent. While our initiative will build on the lessons learned from comparable initiatives across Europe, it will also incorporate gamification into the board game and mobile app. While none of these elements is particularly novel on its own, when combined with talks, workshops and debates, “Media Masters” becomes a novel solution to the problems of media literacy and misinformation. We can contribute by ensuring the preparation of a physical board game, a mobile application with real-life scenarios and content for discussions and events in line with two practical guideline documents on the content of which it will be largely based, citing our contribution with some of the recommendations of the two guideline documents.