Informable

The News Literacy Project

About this app

Boost your news literacy know-how with Informable! Test your ability to sort fact from fiction, and score points for accuracy and speed across three levels of difficulty and four modes of information.

You’ll develop news-literate habits of mind by practicing four distinct skills: distinguishing news articles from opinion pieces, advertisements from other types of information, false evidence from sound evidence, and fact-based statements from opinion-based statements.

For more than a decade, the News Literacy Project has provided educators with tools and resources to teach their students how to navigate today’s challenging and complex information landscape and discover what they can trust, share and act on. Informable, our latest news literacy resource, is an innovative step toward building more responsive tools for real-world learning — expanding beyond the classroom by offering educational opportunities to the public.

Informable has four “brain training”-style modes:
• Checkable or Not?: Is each example fact-based or opinion-based?
• Evidence or Not: Does each item provide strong evidence for the claim it makes?
• Ad or Not: Are these items a form of advertising, or are they or something else (news, opinion, praise on social media, etc.)?
• News or Opinion: Are these examples of straight news or opinion?

Each mode has three levels; players must get at least seven answers (out of 10) right to move to the next level. Points are awarded for accuracy and speed, with results posted on a leaderboard. When players are done, they can review their results to learn more about each item and see why their answers were right or wrong.

Once players successfully complete all three levels of all four modes, they unlock “mix-up mode” — which presents examples from all four modes in random order, simulating how they might encounter information in real life. NLP will add “mix-up mode” levels to the game several times a year."

Ratings and reviews

I like the idea of this app because it always helps to be more aware of how we process the media we view daily on social platforms. However, this app does need a lot of development. I've also experienced the white screen issue others noted, sometimes the log in screen doesn't load up properly, the settings option is all but inaccessible to me, and even trying to flip through the different pages causes my app to freeze entirely. Otherwise, for what it's worth, it's a solid starting point.

The idea is great but the app doesn't work. For 4-5 times in a raw there was just blank white screen, eventually it did turn on. Tried the 1st level of ad activity, worked great (just one suggestion, add fullscreen, or zoom in to see the fine print). When registered account, got no feedback that the action went through. Now the app does open the main page but none of the buttons are responding. There is a lot to fix.

Not particularly helpful. On my phone the screen is too small to see details (needs finger movements to be able to enlarge the screen). And there is no information provided to tell a person why their answer is wrong, so it's not doing a whole lot of educating.

What's new

Informable, by the News Literacy Project, tests your ability to sort fact from fiction. Users score points for accuracy and speed across four game modes.

The latest version contains bug fixes and performance improvements.