Test Your Own Think Smart Skills

Before teaching pupils how to question online information, it can be useful to experience the challenge yourself.

These optional interactive resources place teachers in situations where information may be incomplete, misleading, persuasive or difficult to verify quickly. They strengthen the same habits encouraged in T = Think Smart: pausing before trusting, checking evidence, examining sources and noticing how easily design, emotion or confidence can influence judgement.

Rather than simply asking whether something is “true” or “false,” these tools encourage deeper thinking about:

where information comes from
what makes a source credible or questionable
how manipulation can appear online
how pressure, emotion or first impressions can influence judgement
why slowing down and checking matters

Use the resources below to explore two different interactive experiences.

Online Combat: Final Combat Challenge

Online Combat is an interactive media-literacy resource designed for adult learners and educators. Its Final Combat game challenges users to recognise misinformation, identify manipulation techniques and think critically about persuasive online content.

It is especially useful for practising skills such as:

checking information before trusting it
spotting misleading or manipulative content
recognising bias and emotional influence
questioning persuasive techniques
slowing down before accepting or sharing information

This is the stronger adult professional-learning challenge of the two.

Use it for: strengthening your own critical-thinking and misinformation-checking habits before teaching Think Smart.

TruthQuest

TruthQuest is an interactive media-literacy experience built around viral claims, online posts and source checking. It encourages users to examine claims, investigate sources, compare evidence and judge credibility rather than relying on appearance alone.

It is useful for practising:

evaluating claims
investigating online posts
comparing evidence
recognising tactics used to persuade or mislead
tracing information back to its source

TruthQuest is designed primarily for younger learners, but teachers can use it to experience the type of critical-evaluation activity that supports the goals of T = Think Smart and consider how similar activities could work with pupils.

Use it for: exploring practical claim-checking and source-evaluation tasks in an engaging format.