I Why this work
A nine-year-old who knows how to check a source is more powerful than an adult who doesn't.
Kids in the United States spend more hours online than at any school subject. Half of them watch YouTube every single day before they turn thirteen. Very few schools are tackling the challenge of media-literacy education, and parents already do so much for their children — they shouldn't be burdened by this responsibility as well.
OnLit exists because the gap between how much time a kid spends reading online and how much time is spent teaching them how to read online is the widest gap in childhood education right now. Schools have media-literacy mandates in only twenty-five states; most teachers aren't given enough resources to provide a comprehensive lesson. Parents have little support and an education that is outdated for this current web. Neither is enough.
We're not the curriculum. We're the part of the curriculum that's fun.
Pew Research (2025): 51% of children twelve and under watch YouTube daily. 86% of US adults get news from digital devices.
II How we make things
We don't make games about media literacy.
We make games where the only way to win is to practice media-literacy skills.
A game about media literacy is the slide deck with a quiz at the end. The kid clicks through with the only goal being to get a star, walking away with next to nothing learned. We instead create interactive, exploratory games where kids are allowed to make mistakes and encouraged to admit when they don't understand something. There are numerous opportunities to apply their skills, so understanding builds over time.
That's the pedagogy. The research backing our lessons goes twenty years deep, and OnLit is dedicated to continual research and adaptation. The current backbone of our education is the skill of lateral reading. Stanford's Civic Online Reasoning lab found that two out of three kids correctly identify unreliable sources after lateral-reading training, whereas before training only about one in ten do. The skill is teachable, but the key to getting it is practice, with feedback, in something that doesn't feel like school.
Stanford Civic Online Reasoning: 2 in 3 kids correctly identify unreliable sources after lateral-reading training, up from about 1 in 10 before. Media Literacy Now (2026): 25 US states now have media-literacy legislation, up from 3.
III Who this is for
Kids 7 to 12, and the adults who love them.
The kids are our actual players. The adults, parents, teachers, librarians, are the people deciding whether to put this on a screen. We treat both with the same dignity. The kid pages aren't dumbed down. The parent pages aren't sales pitches. The teacher resources we are actively working on will be a real lesson plan with real standards alignment, not a marketing one-pager dressed up.
If you're a parent: try the game yourself first. Ten minutes. Then hand it to your kid. After, ask one question: was there a level where you weren't sure? That's the conversation we built this to start.
If you're a teacher: there's a starter lesson plan in the Educators hall, and we'll send you a PDF assignment template you can print on Monday.
If you're a kid: skip the rest of this page and go play.