Your Kids Are Online – Do They have the Tools to Avoid Falling into Rabbit Holes?

By Christine German

As parents and educators know, kids of all ages are active online. For a long time, we believed that sites or apps like Roblox and YouTube would protect kids from exposure to harmful content. We know now that this is not the case. Despite stated protections for young people’s accounts, malicious actors can and do take advantage of online platforms to manipulate kids. The Netflix show “Adolescence” recently brought this conversation into the mainstream, forcing parents to confront extreme possibilities for radicalization online.

Enter Daniel the Duck. Daniel is one of the friendly cartoon avatars of a new K-5 digital literacy curriculum called Developing and Using Critical Comprehension (DUCC). DUCC’s creators were trying to understand why the education system hadn’t caught up with the reality of children’s digital lives. They knew there had to be a way to teach kids about recognizing and avoiding harmful online content in ways they can internalize and practice. Their answer: that learning to use the internet today is about far more than technology.

Digital literacy lessons usually focus on pure technological fluency—teaching kids how to use the internet, but not how to process what they find there. This ignores what educators call “social-emotional learning,” which is key to kids’ ability to connect their personal inner world to the world around them. The social-emotional element of the online world is often overlooked; many kids use the internet as their primary socialization method, connecting them to friends near and far. Yet while the internet is socializing kids, it is not a social being. There is a difference between online interactions, hidden behind anonymous usernames and long comment threads, and face-to-face interactions.

This duality has helped create an epidemic of loneliness and declines in mental health never before seen, and it is rare that digital literacy lessons recognize and attempt to address these issues. The DUCC curriculum, however, aims to combine digital literacy with social-emotional learning, with Daniel the Duck and his friends providing a supportive and immersive world for kids to tackle tough concepts.

With AI becoming an increasingly important part of kids’ lives and learning, DUCC teaches kids what some adults don’t yet understand: how AI works, how it can manipulate information, and how it uses algorithms to feed you information that it thinks you want. The video Miko the AI, made for a roughly first-grade audience, explains AI in age-appropriate, value-neutral terms, without fostering fear or admiration. Games like Fact or Fowl and Burst the Bubble! put kids in the driver’s seat, asking them to identify ways that AI-generated ads might be using persuasion tactics and how algorithms feed us information that might not always be reliable.

DUCC takes the approach that the best way to protect kids from harmful online content is by teaching them to identify and avoid it themselves. By giving kids tools to think critically about what they see online, including analyzing the reliability of information, connecting online actions to real-world consequences, and understanding how AI and algorithms operate, DUCC aims to empower kids to choose their own, safer paths.

DUCC won the Invent2Prevent competition in 2022, and armed with that win, the team partnered with PERIL at American University and created a team of experts in teaching, literacy, critical thinking, digital literacy, public policy, and curriculum design to develop the robust curriculum available today. PERIL’s testing and monitoring system ensures that the curriculum is backed by ongoing research to maintain high quality and reliable results.

Daniel and his friends have already reached nearly 400 kids in 22 classrooms across four states during our pilot testing. Results have shown that kids, on average, increased their knowledge by 12 points, a statistically significant difference from where they started. And DUCC’s journey is just beginning. The curriculum is available for free from DUCC’s website, and is aligned to meet Common Core, ISTE, and CASEL standards and is being reviewed for IB PYP alignment.

The DUCC curriculum is one way that we can support our kids in finding and creating a safer and kinder internet. We are partnering with schools across the country to provide DUCC in their elementary schools, and we hope to show up in a school near you.

Christine German is the Program Manager for the Developing and Using Critical Comprehension (DUCC) program at the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. She is also currently a PhD candidate in political science at George Mason University.