We were three university students who won Japan's round of Google's Youth Verification Challenge and came fourth in the world. The competition taught us something no lecture ever had: you learn to verify information by doing it, under time pressure, with a team, and it is genuinely fun. Then we looked at how media literacy was taught in Japanese schools. A visiting speaker, a slide deck, a warning to be careful online. Students listened politely and changed nothing, because nobody had asked them to actually check anything.
Meanwhile the problem kept getting worse: rumors after the Noto earthquake, war footage from the wrong war, and now AI-generated images that fool adults. Teenagers get most of their information from short video and social feeds, and for most of them the first time anyone asks them to judge whether something is real is the moment it matters.
Teachers told us they wanted to teach this and did not know how. The techniques change every few months and nobody had trained them. So we built the thing we wished someone had given us at fifteen: a game whose puzzle cannot be solved without doing real verification on the real internet, wrapped in a story students want to finish. We launched it in April 2023 as a student group and incorporated as Classroom Adventure in 2024.
A class receives a challenge from an anonymous blogger called Ray. In teams of three or four, on their own school devices, students dig through Ray's blog and social posts, find the lies and the clues, and use the live internet to close in on who Ray is: search operators, reverse-image search, geolocating a photo from its details, checking a short video, spotting an AI-generated image. The game takes 60 minutes. A 40-minute lesson follows that names the techniques they just used and connects them to real cases. Teacher-led and online versions fit one class period.
The design rule is doubt, investigate, judge. Every puzzle needs all three, and a team that skips one gets stuck. Sensitive real events are turned into fictional, safe cases so a class can practice without exposure to harm. The content is written with professional fact-checkers at the Japan Fact-check Center, the Taiwan FactCheck Center and Annie Lab at the University of Hong Kong.
Evidence: we collect student surveys and teacher feedback after every session. Teachers tell us the whole class stays with it and can name the techniques afterwards ("this covered critical thinking through to the latest techniques in one lesson"). Students tell us they now check things they used to share unchecked. Endorsed by Daisuke Furuta (Japan Fact-check Center), Prof. Masato Kajimoto (Annie Lab) and Prof. Kenichi Shimomura (Hakuoh University). Technology: a web platform in Japanese, English and Chinese; nothing to install.
Ray's Blog has reached 100,000+ students in 1,100+ schools and organizations across 14 countries. In Japan it runs in public and private secondary schools, at universities including Keio, where the library uses it for new students, across a 131-school tutoring network, and in children's homes. Prefectural governments (Hyogo, Tottori) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government have adopted it, and in 2025 Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications selected us to build a national prebunking program on top of it.
Outside Japan, the Chinese version is distributed across Taiwan with the Taiwan FactCheck Center, and the English version has run with UC Irvine, MAFINDO in Indonesia, Van Lang University in Vietnam and Thomas Haney Secondary in Canada. Since 2024 it has been the training ground for GenAsia Challenge, the youth verification competition we inherited from Google, with around 2,000 participants a year across Asia.
In the last two years: the 2025 World Summit Award for Learning & Education; the GESAwards 2025 R&D Innovation prize; the Internet Media Awards 2026; and a teacher-led edition so schools can run the game without us.
Over the next two to three years: a Teacher Edition with a live console so any teacher can run a verification lesson and see what each team searches and decides; pilots in Japan and Taiwan in 2027; first US classrooms in states that mandate media literacy; and localized versions with our fact-checking partners in Thailand and Indonesia.
Ray's Blog launched in April 2023 as one Japanese mystery for secondary students, run by us in the room. Almost everything around that core has changed since.
Languages and audiences: an English version (2023), a Traditional Chinese version built with the Taiwan FactCheck Center for schools across Taiwan (2024), and a beginner version for elementary students with simpler cases and more guidance (2025). Keio's library runs a customized edition for new students that teaches its own databases alongside web verification.
Content: the puzzles are rebuilt as the fakes change. Checkpoints on short-video verification and AI-generated images were added as those became the main way teenagers meet false information, and a fake-account checkpoint teaches how to read a profile, not just a post.
How it is delivered: in 2026 we released a teacher-led edition, with a manual, a video guide and a projector mode that shows timed hints from Ray and skips them when most of the class is already past that clue, so a teacher with no fact-checking background can run it in one period. Since 2024 the game is also the training round for GenAsia Challenge, the youth verification competition we took over from Google.
Next: a Teacher Edition with a live console, so the teacher sees what each team searches and decides as it happens, piloting in Japan and Taiwan in 2027.
Email us at info@classroom-adventure.com with your country, the language you teach in, the age of your students and roughly how many will take part. We reply with the options and a date.
There are three ways to run Ray's Blog. A facilitated session, where one of our team comes to the school or joins online and runs the game and the lesson; this is how most schools start. The teacher-led edition, where you run it yourself from our manual and video guide, for schools that want to repeat it every year or across many classes. And an online session over Zoom for schools far from us or spread across several sites.
What you need on the day: one internet-connected device per team of three or four (Chromebook, iPad, Windows and phones all work), a projector, school filtering that allows web search, and 90-120 minutes, or one class period for the teacher-led version. Nothing to install; students join with a name and a team, no accounts.
Sessions run in Japanese, English or Traditional Chinese. Fact-checking organizations, universities and education partners outside Japan who want a version localized for their country can write to the same address; that is how our Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam partnerships began.
If this one still doesn't fit, tell me the number their counter shows and I'll calibrate the rest of the fields to it — the three 1,500-character answers you already pasted are at 1,303 / 1,492 / 1,497, so the two long ones may need the same treatment.
