Good Things’ Scam Detective game is a fun way to support people to learn how to be safer online. This article gives you some ideas on how you can help people to learn about scam using this game.
Scams are getting more sophisticated and harder to spot. This new game gives people some basic skills to spot scams and not trust everything they receive by text message or email.
The Scam Detective game was co-designed with people with intellectual disability and is written in easy to understand English. You can also turn on the sound to have the words on the screen spoken to you.
This makes it a perfect game to play with people with intellectual disability that you support (or anyone who wants to learn about scams!)
Below are two fun ways that you can use this game when supporting people in your community to learn about scams.
Play the game in a group
Playing games is a really fun way to engage a group of learners. Here is an example of a session you could run with 5-8 people.
- Icebreaker: Play the Thumbs or Thumbs down game to get everyone feeling comfortable in the room
- Discussion (Connect to topic): Have you ever received a scam text message or email? Ask everyone to share their experience with scams and introduce the idea that not everything you see on your phone or online is real. Some people are trying to trick you!
- Online learning: Play the Scam Detective game. Put it on a big screen and play together OR support your group to load the game on their device and play individually. Have choccies ready as prizes!
- Practical activity: Ask everyone to look at their text messages and see if they can spot a scam message using the clues they just learnt about. Remember to be careful and not to click any links!
- Reflection: Ask everyone to share one thing they learnt about scams and celebrate with some cake!
This session will take about an hour. Stop for breaks whenever your group needs it.
Host a Scam Detective event
Invite your community along to a fun Scam Detective event. Encourage everyone to come dressed up as a scam detective or have magnifying glasses ready to hand out on arrival.
- Icebreaker: After a welcome cuppa, ask the group to pair up. The pairs then ‘interview’ each other, asking for their name and one thing they know about scams.
- Discussion (Connect to topic): Share information about three common scams that people may get in their text messages or emails. Let people know that there are some ways they can spot scams, and it is useful to be suspicious!
- Online learning: Play the Scam Detective game. Put it on a big screen and play together OR support your group to load the game on their device and play individually.
- Practical activity: Ask everyone to go to the Scamwatch website or official social media channels. They can choose to follow or subscribe for official information about the latest scams they need to watch out for.
- Reflection: Ask the group to pair up. The pairs then ‘interview’ each other, asking for one thing the person has learnt about scams. As a group discuss how everyone needs to be a scam detective. Create and print out fun Scam Detective badges to hand out as prizes!
This session will take about two hours. Stop for breaks whenever your group needs it – it is good to schedule at least a 15 minute break in the middle of the session. Make it even more fun by decorating the event space in a detective theme, such as by printing out and hanging up big images of magnifying glasses or having cupcakes with images of detectives on them.
More tips to help others learn with this game
- Explain information in easy to understand English and take your time. Try to avoid using jargon, or if you do, explain what the jargon word means.
- Modify our group and event suggestions to work for your community and learners. They are here to help you as a guide but you can adapt it to meet you and your learner’s needs.
- Create a summary of what you covered in your session and print it out for your learners to take home. They can refer back to it later.
- If your learners struggle with reading English, turn on the sound and the words on the screen in the game will be narrated for you.
- You may need to play the game or cover the information a couple of times to embed learning. That’s ok! Take your time and work at your learner’s pace. Try coming back with a refresher session on this topic for several weeks in a row and see the confidence and knowledge of your learners increase.
- You do not have to play this game in a special digital skills class. Use it in any of the existing groups that you support like social groups.
- The group session can easily be adapted to play the game one on one with someone you support. Just adjust the icebreaker and discussion to be an informal conversation.
- You can play the game on any device as long as it has an internet connection. We recommend using a tablet or computer as the bigger screen makes it easier to play the game.
- Make the session fun! The more fun you can make learning new things, the more the people you support will engage with the information and want to keep learning.
- Making a digital skills lesson feel inclusive and like a safe space starts before people even arrive. Be friendly when booking people in, give a warm welcome when they arrive, then go at the pace of your learners. Plan to hold it in a familiar room or space – it could even be outside in a garden if that is where they feel most comfortable!
- If a game isn’t quite right for your group, try our other learning resources like online courses and videos.