March 6, 2026 Reflection

This week we talk about coding and gaming in education. The first coding game we played with was a Frozen themed unit on Code.org called Code with Anna and Elsa. Later in class, we had a fairly significant change in tone, going from a light-hearted Disney Princess game to a somewhat triggering disinformation game called Get Bad News.

I had some fun playing around with the coding for the Frozen coding unit, and ended up making a collection of snowflakes. This kind of software is pretty good for classroom activities, since students that finish quickly can play around in the sandbox so to speak, using the program they’ve just learned to make their own creations.

I don’t think I would use the next game in a classroom context, due to some people’s inability to separate games from reality, both from the perspective of not wanting to do bad things in a game, and from the perspective of being encouraged to do bad things in a game and translating that to their actual actions. I personally have no problem making the separation, and have no issues with doing horrific and immoral things in a game that I would never consider actually doing. As such, by doing what I thought was least morally correct at each turn in the game I was able to achieve a score in the tens of thousands.

The game developers claim that “playing it builds cognitive resistance against common forms of manipulation that you may encounter online”(https://www.getbadnews.com/en), however I found that the information in the post game sequence was far more effective in this, while the game itself revealed some of the thought process and moral character required to become a disinformation producer.