Internet Safety Games
From LoveToKnow Safety
When you are trying to teach children how to stay safe online, using Internet safety games is a great strategy. Making learning fun means that the lessons are more likely to stay with the youngsters after they have finished playing.
Examples of Internet Safety Games
If you are looking for Internet safety games for children to play, visit any of the following websites.
Kidscom
The Kidscom website offers 10 great Internet safety tips, along with a fun fill-in-the-blanks game based on them. Participants can always refer back to the Internet safety tips if they get stuck.
AT&T Internet Safety Connections
If your children are interested in super heroes, the AT&T Internet Safety Connections site would be a good choice. Elementary-school-aged children can help Captain Broadband to find and defeat a nasty Internet character. The children could click on various buildings in Safety Land and answer a question about Internet safety in each one.
After choosing between two possibilities, they can move onto another building (and another question). When all the questions have been answered successfully, the child can ask an adult for help to print off a Hero Certificate indicating that they helped the Internet superhero save the town.
Jo Fool or Jo Cool
This next Internet safety game is designed for children between the ages of nine and 12. The participants start off by taking a Cybertour of 12 different websites. At each one, they need to stop to consider:
- The content of the site
- The decision Jo is being asked to make when visiting the site
- What types of things Jo should be on the lookout for when surfing the web
- Whether Jo has made the right choice in each situation
After the Cybertour has been completed, then the kids can test their knowledge by answering 20 questions about Internet safety in the Jo Cool/Jo Fool CyberQuiz.
Internet Safety Hangman
A choice for slightly older children available online is the Internet Safety Hangman game. This activity would be a good way to test a young person's knowledge about Internet safety issues after they have listened to a presentation or participated in some other activities relating to this topic.
Web Wise Kids
Another Internet safety game for teens is available from WebWiseKids.org. Mirror Image teaches young people about cyberstalking in a game which is based on a real-life incident where several young women were victimized by an online predator pretending to be a modeling scout. The game is available for a donation of $20.00.
Mid-Hudson Library
The Library website has a very simple, question-and-answer quiz that would be suitable for young children. If they answer the question correctly, then they see flashing stars on the screen. A wrong answer results in the word "Danger" coming up on the screen with an explanation of why the answer was incorrect.
Are You Internet Safe? - A Webquest
Another version of an Internet safety game is webquest, which a group of students can work on together. The goal of this particular activity is to have the students come up with ideas to make learning about Internet safety a fun activity.
As part of the process, they are asked to take some online Internet safety quizzes, review and evaluate lists of rules to stay safe online, and find a true account of a chat room encounter that turned nasty for the participants that they can discuss. As the students work through the activities, they will increase their own knowledge about Internet safety.
As you can see, Internet safety games are available for many different age groups. The Internet can be a great place to find information, but we need to make sure that children and teens who are using this resource know how to stay safe online.
