Students compete to be ‘Reality Champion’

Middle school competitors deferred to their digital magnifying glass as they tried to determine whether King Charles was, in fact, pictured with a greasy plate of pepperoni pizza last month.

One Grade 8 student requested the game master in this round of “Reality Champion” zoom-in on the King’s right hand. Another wanted a close-up of the logo on a napkin holder in the background of the screenshot.

“It’s not enough to say it’s fake or it’s real,” said Devin King, a teacher who invented the media literacy competition that can get rowdy inside Winnipeg’s General Wolfe School.

“What tools are we using to actually figure that out?”

Last week, King screened short video clips, audio snippets and screenshots, including a viral Instagram post made by a U.S pizza parlour account (@meltingpotpizza) on April 28.

Following extensive deliberation about the image and its caption, students cast their individual votes by way of putting their hands up.

King paused for dramatic effect before revealing the answer — it was a product of generative artificial intelligence or GenAI — and pulling up a news article debunking it.

It elicited cheers and, among those who guessed it was an authentic photo, moans.

The activity was designed so students — in stark contrast to the solitary nature of their after-hours scrolling — are encouraged to share what they’ve noticed on their TikTok feeds.

There’s a tally of points on the whiteboard in Room 211, but King tells players that winning isn’t the point, especially given that AI tools are becoming increasingly more sophisticated.

The point is to hone critical thinking skills, he said, noting that his ultimate goal is to make skepticism his students’ default setting.

“I want students to be thinking about the world they’re living in and not passively accepting whatever the message is — even if it’s the correct one,” King added.

The Winnipeg School Division released an AI framework for staff and students at the start of the school year. “AI assisted, never AI-led” is its overarching principle.

Senior administration saw little value in creating hard-and-fast rules because of how rapidly this technology is mutating and new tools are coming online.

Since the first day of school in September, OpenAI has announced more than 80 updates and release notes about its flagship chatbot.

ChatGPT’s new default model is GPT-5.5 Instant — the great-great-great-great grandchild of the first free version launched in November 2022.

Despite all the updates, it continues to have hallucinations; asked about what that relation would be in human terms, it generated an incorrect answer and, following a reporter’s correction, admitted it had miscalculated.

“We live in a world where we have to challenge things and question everything. We have to have techno-skepticism,” said Monica Gadsby, vice-president of the Manitoba Association of Education Technology Leaders.

As far as Gadsby is concerned, all teachers — not just librarians or technology specialists — have a responsibility to develop digital literacy. Neither children nor adults can truly be literate without these skills in 2026, she said, noting they include being able to recognize emotional language, conspiracy theories and fake experts.

MediaSmarts, a non-profit dedicated to media literacy research and education in Canada, is focusing advocacy efforts on promoting “companion reading” or “lateral reading.”

“What it focuses on is not trying to look for clues within the source itself in an image or video, but looking for external evidence that would tell you it’s legitimate or it isn’t,” said Matthew Johnson, director of education.

Johnson noted a growing body of research shows it’s not enough to teach people how to identify misinformation because then they are also more likely to disbelieve real claims and content that are true.

He’s a proponent of teaching students how to use fact-checking tools and access Snopes.com and other credible websites that specialize in verifying viral posts.

General Wolfe School students used Google’s reverse-image search engine, as well as credible news outlets, to come to conclusions during Reality Champion.

“I like doing quizzes, I like solving puzzles and I like mysteries,” said Kayden Tully, a 13-year-old competitor.

Another Grade 8 student, Julian Evans, said Reality Champion is now one his favourite things about school.

Evans said it’s been cool to learn about GenAI’s challenges with lighting, shadows and other small details.

“I find it really fun,” he said.

Sometimes, students guess based on their gut instinct that a piece of content simply feels soul-less, King said.

“As a literacies educator, I’m all about the soul of writing,” he said.

“I’m concerned, when I see students or institutions or organizations using it, because what that tells me is that they don’t respect us enough to use their own soul to create.”

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca