The Good Play Project
Exploring how young people navigate the positive opportunities and ethical challenges of digital life.
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 App Generation (2013), and Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media (2009).
In collaboration with Henry Jenkins and his Project New Media Literacies group, the The Good Play Project team developed Our Space, a casebook of classroom activities related to digital ethics. The research carried out by team also informed Common Sense Media’s Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum.
In 2017, the Good Play project entered a new phase of research 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 built on The Good Project’s prior studies with a series of mixed methods investigations, including surveys, observations, experiments, and interviews.
Explore the books and tools that emerged from this project.
Meet the TGPP Team
Thank You to Our Funders
This project was made possible thanks to the generosity and support of The MacArthur Foundation and The Germanacos Foundation.