Student Voice · 2h
BREAKING: they're taking your phone all day in September. Pushed through over break — no student got to speak.
Half of American teens say the news just arrives — on a phone, between a friend's post and an ad, never saying where it came from. Infodemic is a game that makes a room full of kids slow that feed down, check what's in it, and argue their way to one thing they can all stand behind.
Maya's feed
Devon's feed
Same story. Different feeds. Now they have to talk.
And almost nobody arrives with the habits to read it.
Everyone's on their own phone. The game happens between them, out loud, in the room.
The whole feed lands in sixty seconds. Thumbs only, no time to think — that's the honest baseline, because it's how everyone reads a feed when nobody's watching.
Search it. Ask an AI. Look up who runs the account and who funds them. Everyone digs through the same evidence — and there's no answer key waiting at the end.
The table writes one community note together, each player holding a different job. It doesn't ship until it survives the skeptic sitting next to them.
Every player is handed a different version of the same story. So the disagreement at the table is real rather than staged — and the only way out of it is to go look things up and talk to each other. It's a phone game whose entire point is the conversation in the room.
Infodemic isn't a set of canned scenarios that go stale by February. You build the feed from real stories pulled off a live news wire, set how long you've got, and publish the whole thing as one word you read to the room.
One button pulls fresh headlines off a live news wire, and the game generates each story's framings and the evidence behind them. You aren't writing curriculum at ten at night.
What goes in the feed is your call. How each story gets framed — and which player sees which version — is generated at publish time. Nobody can accuse you of stacking the deck when you didn't build the deck.
If nothing in your feed plays spun, there's nothing for a table to disagree about — and the console says so before you publish, not after the bell.
This is the solo version — one player, no sign-up, about three minutes. The classroom game is the same thing with three other people arguing back.
Something in this feed is off.
Five stories are about to land. Some of them are playing you.
The demo is built for a full screen — it'll feel cramped inside this page on a phone. Open it on its own instead.
Open the demoGrab two to four people, give it twenty minutes, then tell us everything that went wrong.
One person picks the topics. The round assembles itself — you don't approve stories one by one.
Publishing gives you a single word, like OTTER, to read out to everyone else.
Everyone opens the game on their own device. The first player enters their name and just the word,
and gets back a full code like OTTER-4213. Everyone else enters their name and that full code.
Every player fills this in separately — including the kids. Three minutes. Confusing, boring or broken is the most useful thing you can tell us, so please don't smooth it over.
Infodemic began at Sora Schools, a project-based school for grades 6–12. The game is what came out of a school built on the idea that students should be doing real work, not answering questions someone already knew the answer to.
It's being built during the Assembly Code fellowship, and it's free and open source — AGPL-3.0 on GitHub, for anyone who wants to run it, teach with it, or take it somewhere else.