Fostering Social Media Literacy through a Participatory Mixed-Methods Approach: Discussion of Workshop Findings

Social media is a permanent companion of today's adolescents. Its various positive and negative effects on well-being have been broadly discussed. We argue that transparency and knowledge about underlying principles of social media are crucial steps towards empowering its adolescent users. Therefore, we aim to design a serious game addressing these concerns. This paper describes a participatory approach to game design and presents results from 15 workshop sessions including qualitative data from various workshop activities and 19 prototypes designed by adolescents. We present both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of these low-fidelity prototypes as well as the content discussed within these workshops, thereby, laying out adolescents' views on relevant topics, contents and respective design for a serious game.