1 - Start ~4 mins
You have looked at young people's online rights and at who is meant to protect them, including platforms themselves. Today the focus is on the companies that build the apps and sites you use: the design choices they make, the rules they work under, and how safety reporting is supposed to work when something goes wrong. You will tear down common features, sort what each one gives you against what it can cost you, and judge where the balance tips.
2 - Examine and Discuss ~4 mins
Every app and site you open is designed. Features such as the next clip starting itself, notifications, infinite scroll and targeted ads are choices someone made.
Digital technology companies sit in three roles at once:
- Design: they decide how the product works and what it nudges you to do.
- Regulation: they must follow the rules. Government sets and enforces online-safety rules for services in Ireland, and oversees how your personal data is used.
- Safety reporting: they must give users ways to report harm, and then act on those reports.
Name one feature you notice every day. Do not decide yet whether it mainly helps or hinders. Next you will sort real effects of common features and decide, with reasons, whether each mainly benefits the user or can mainly work against them.
3 - Hands-on: Design Teardown Sort ~14 mins
Work on the interactive activity. Each card states a real effect of a common platform feature in plain terms. Your job is to argue it into a bucket, not to match a tone.
- Read each card aloud before anyone moves it.
- Decide together: does this mainly benefit the user, or can it mainly work against the user?
- Before a card can stay in a bucket, someone must finish this line out loud: "It goes here because…" Name who benefits if you can (the user, the company, both).
- If the room disagrees, hear both sides, then place it and note the disagreement.
- When the cards are placed, scan the board. For each feature (next-clip start, notifications, infinite scroll), you should see effects sitting in both buckets, or a clear argument about why not.
If devices are available, pairs may sort first. Then the class merges one contested card on the board. If not, run the whole sort as a class from the board. The learning is in the reason you give, not in racing to finish.
Design features: help or hinder?
4 - Reporting Harm: the Jordan Sequence ~10 mins
Work in pairs, then share.
Read this invented situation together:
Jordan, 14, keeps getting private messages from an account they do not know. The messages turn nasty after Jordan ignores the first one. Jordan wants it to stop and does not want the account to keep finding them.
In order, write the five steps you think should happen on your mini-whiteboard or page so you can read them back. Use this skeleton:
- What Jordan does first on the app or site.
- What evidence Jordan keeps, and why.
- Who Jordan tells offline.
- What the company is supposed to do with a report.
- One place Jordan can go next if the platform does not fix it (pick one: a trusted adult, the school's own way of raising a concern, or the wider system of online-safety rules behind the platform).
Be ready to read your sequence to the class. Before you finish, check a five-step reporting sequence you can defend.
5 - Make Sense ~5 mins
Pick one feature still on the sort board (next-clip start, notifications or infinite scroll). As a class, say aloud only:
- main benefit for someone our age
- main way it can work against someone our age
- one design change that would improve the trade-off
Features are choices that can help you and work on you at the same time. Companies design the product, sit under rules, and must offer reporting you can actually use.
You do not have to decide that platforms are heroes or villains. You do have to weigh what you gain, what you risk, and what would make a trade-off fairer.
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