Most democratic governments have recognized the enormous importance of media education in schools. It teaches skills that enable people to navigate and act in a media-driven world in a self-determined, competent, and responsible manner. Accordingly, extensive support programs have been launched in many countries. Today, teachers can download comprehensive teaching materials from a variety of websites.

But if a teacher obtains such teaching materials from the internet and hands them out to students to work on, how does this differ from a student visiting such a website himself and interacting with the content? Doesn’t the school itself also have the characteristics of a media channel? Teaching materials can, of course, also be biased, contain incorrect information, or even be designed as a means of propaganda.

But then this approach is part of the problem it purports to solve! Furthermore, modern social media are so complex that the learning content to be conveyed is often limited to recipe-like recommendations for action that are not based on a deeper rational and intuitive understanding.

Attempting to teach meta-learning (which includes media education) using traditional teaching methods is ultimately a contradiction in terms and is therefore bound to fail for many essential concepts.

Meta-learning skills cannot simply be drummed into students. Such an attempt is also highly unethical: no other skill has such a decisive impact on an individual’s life path and on society as a whole. Indoctrination in this area (whether intentional or unconscious) is therefore particularly harmful.

A fundamentally different approach is therefore needed. We suggest letting students discover the underlying principles for themselves. To this end, we currently create a simple 3D multi-user gaming environment (similar to the game “Minecraft,” which is very popular with young people) that can enable such an experience. 

We prefer the term “experiences” to the common term “serious games” because, unlike serious games, our experiences do not have clearly defined objectives. Yes, even the learning objectives are only vaguely defined and are not disclosed to the students. So there is no officially “correct” solution. After each game, the students process their experiences and try to draw connections to the “big” media channels.