The Good Play Project

Exploring how young people navigate the positive opportunities and ethical challenges of digital life.

IN: Digital Life & Learning - Ethics at Work - Secondary / High School - Higher Education - Adult & Lifelong Learning

The Good Play Project is a research and educational initiative focused on the ethical contours of young people’s digital lives. The research initially involved qualitative interviews with teens, tweens, young adults, parents and teachers about ethical issues around online identity, privacy, property, and speech. A related project called Developing Minds and Digital Media - led by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis (University of Washington) - explored how youth navigate identity, intimacy, and imagination in the digital era. These two projects resulted in numerous articles and several books, including Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap (2014, The MIT Press), The App Generation (2013, Yale University Press), and Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media (2009, The MIT Press).

In collaboration with Henry Jenkins and his Project New Media Literacies group, the Good Play team developed Our Space, a casebook of classroom activities related to digital ethics. The research carried out by the Good Play Project team also informed Common Sense Media’s Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum.

In 2017, the Good Play project entered a new phase of research. Led by Carrie James, Emily Weinstein, and Howard Gardner, we are probing the personal, moral, ethical, and civic dilemmas of tweens’ and teens’ digital lives today, with a particular focus on pedagogical approaches to support digital citizenship effectively. The research builds on the Good Project’s prior studies with a series of mixed methods investigations, including surveys, observations, experiments, and interviews.