The REAL Implications of Project REAL

It doesn’t seem five minutes since my last update, but I am aware it has been a lot longer; time flies when you are enjoying a project! It has been all go the past couple of months with Project Real…. we are now starting to see the REAL implications of Project REAL, which are fantastic and really emphasise the importance of this project!

The co-creation was a success and the suggestions and materials the young people came up with were a great basis for the development of the five sessions: Fake News, Fake Stories, Fake Accounts, Fake Photos and Fake Videos. Their ideas included quizzes, spot the fake photo, write your own conspiracy theory and many, many more.

As a team, we found it an enjoyable task collating the young people’s ideas into deliverable PowerPoint presentations! After all, the young people are the experts in what they find enjoyable, and we want these sessions to be as engaging as possible. I strongly believe co-creation is a fantastic research tool!

It was apparent that the young people enjoyed engaging with the influencers as I talked about in my prior post. The young people asked for a variety of videos to be developed by the influencers for the final materials. As with co-creation principles, these ideas were taken on board and for each session various influencers described how to spot for example, fake news, and the pros and cons of again, as an example, fake news.

Another common theme throughout the final materials, was the reference to SOURCE an acronym designed to help people spot fake news (see image below). This ensured focus on the main aim of the project and was especially great to see written on a whiteboard when I visited the schools- seeing research in action really is exciting!

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Talking about going into schools, I also had the pleasure of running focus groups with the young people who had participated in the sessions and the teachers who had delivered them. I was overwhelmed with the positive responses and am greatly enjoying transcribing these interviews!

So what’s next? After transcribing the interviews, as a team we will explore ways in which the programme can be improved. We will also analyse the survey data to further examine the REAL implications of Project REAL.

Keep your eyes peeled for conference appearances and research papers…