2in3
Kids correctly identify unreliable sources after lateral-reading training. Before training, roughly one in ten do.
Stanford Civic Online Reasoning · McGrew et al.
Children's media-literacy education · For kids 7–12 · est. 2026
Childrens media literacy,
made playable.
Kids ages 7 to 12 are already online. They deserve sharper tools than "be careful out there." OnLit's free browser games help them practice the questions that build media literacy: Who made this? What do they want me to believe? What might be missing?
I The Numbers
What the research keeps finding.
Four numbers about how kids are reading the internet today, and how a small amount of practice changes the outcome.
51%
Of kids twelve and under watch YouTube every day.
Pew Research, 2025
25
US states with media-literacy legislation on the books, up from three a decade ago.
Media Literacy Now, 2026
86%
Of US adults get their news from digital devices.
Pew Research, 2025
II Currently Showing
Three games for kids 7–12, plus a parent portal.
Each game gives kids a short, focused way to practice one media-literacy skill at a time. The parent portal lets you see what they're working on.
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Open · beta Ages 10–12
Dino Party Patrol
Six-level browser game · ages 10–12 · about 30 minutes
A pack of party-planning dinosaurs has to figure out which invitations are real. Six rooms, six tricks of the trade: primary sources, reverse image search, and lateral reading.
Play in your browser -
Open · beta Ages 9–11
Lanternville · beta
Cozy shop-sim · ages 9–11 · about 45 minutes per session
Your kid runs the village information shop, helping townspeople answer questions by checking sources at a magic newsstand. By the end of a session they've practiced lateral reading, the habit of checking a claim against a second source, dozens of times. The beta just opened.
Read about Lanternville -
Open · beta Ages 9–12
The Whole Story · beta preview
Comic-style branching narrative · ages 8–12 · five scenarios, twenty-one endings
Your kid sees a claim online, hears a rumor at school, or watches a viral clip, and decides what to do next. The beta preview just opened.
Read about The Whole Story -
Parents coming soon
The Parent Portal
Web · iPad · Mac · for parents
See which games your kid finished, which rooms they replayed, and which questions stumped them.
About the parent portal
III Who Made This
The team.
We're three seniors at Riverdale Country School, building this as our CS Capstone. As students ourselves, we know how quickly media changes for kids. Every level goes to real classrooms before it ships, and we keep teachers and librarians close while we figure out what actually works.
Timothy McKenna
Co-founder & game engineer
Riverdale '26 → Dartmouth '30
Matilda Sales
Co-founder & game engineer
Riverdale '26 → Stanford '30
Ezra Marks
Co-founder & platform engineer
Riverdale '26 → Cornell '30
Our games come from Stanford's Civic Online Reasoning research on how kids actually build the habit of checking. We turn the research into something kids practice, not something they have to memorize.
IV What We Believe
A few things we hold to be true.
A nine-year-old who knows how to check a source is more powerful than an adult who doesn't.
We don't make games about media literacy. We make games where the only way to win is to practice media literacy skills: try the wrong thing, try the right thing, until something clicks.
The parent portal lets you see what your kid practiced, so the conversation can keep going at home.
Read the full mission