Sensitizing young children on internet addiction and online safety risks through storytelling in a mobile application
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Sensitizing young children on internet addiction and online safety risks through storytelling in a mobile application Fotis Lazarinis 1 & Kyriaki Alexandri 2 & Chris Panagiotakopoulos 3 & Vasileios S. Verykios 1 Received: 10 January 2019 / Accepted: 19 June 2019/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This study presents a novel application which through storytelling attempts to improve the understanding of students with respect to online risks. Each short story presents a situation that children face while surfing the Internet. Through the emotions of the virtual characters and the existence of specific visual clues the tool seeks to make students to deliberate on the online activities and alter their attitudes. The design goals of the application and specific visual stories are first presented in the paper and then the paper is evaluated with the participation of teachers and students who provided us with positive feedback and some ideas for future improvements. The main findings of our research are discussed and potential extensions are presented. Keywords Safer internet . Digital addiction . Game based learning . Mobile learning .
Online activity . Risk prevalence
* Fotis Lazarinis [email protected] Kyriaki Alexandri [email protected] Chris Panagiotakopoulos [email protected] Vasileios S. Verykios [email protected]
1
Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece
2
Ministry of Education, Athens, Greece
3
University of Patras, Patras, Greece
Education and Information Technologies
1 Introduction Students, even very young children, have constant access to the Web. Although several parental control software limit the access of inappropriate sources, research has shown that there are many risks on the Internet which cannot be filtered out and thus we should make students more alerted (Bibi et al. 2014; Lazarinis 2010). Past studies have reported a variety of potential risks on which students are exposed. These problems vary from encountering extreme violence to cyberbullying and from exposure to deviant sexual content to invasion of privacy (Livingstone et al. 2017a; Lembrechts 2012; Tokunaga 2010; Lazarinis 2010). These are a few examples of the online risks for children and adolescents. In general, the internet is a medium over which parents often have very little control usually because of their limited internet skills. Therefore we believe that educating the students and training the teachers in issues relating to internet safety would be a better approach to improve the problem. In this work we target on young children and we attempt to increase their level of awareness with a gamish approach. Our main goal is to pass the simple message “not everything is as it seems on the internet”. Thus they should be more prudent when they share information on the Web and they should not believe all they see. We focus on specific aspects of internet safety related to data exposure, sexual exploitation and internet addiction. Through a mobile application, presenting short
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