ReasonED is a game-based learning website that improves the ability of users to identify logical fallacies through engaging, age-appropriate video games. Games are be curated for elementary, middle, and high school students respectively to support continuous learning over all grade levels. Our goal is to help educators cultivate their student’s critical reasoning skills over the long term and beyond the scope of a single subject.

ReasonED games all share the same goal of introducing and improving logical fallacy identification skills, but the difficulties and approaches vary depending on the age group. While the concepts and scenarios will be simplified for younger ages, the games aim to plant the seeds of critical thinking and encourage kids to recognize flawed reasoning. Many of the games involve logical fallacies personified as fun characters. The fallacy characters can serve as memorable guides in student’s fallacy education journeys.

ReasonED resources can serve as a supplement to traditional classroom learning, offering an interactive and gamified approach to enhance critical reasoning skills, or as a standalone resource to introduce logical fallacies in places where such curriculum may be lacking. Because ReasonED is a website, once it is whitelisted on school networks, students can access it in their free time during school.

In this digital era of the information age, the need for strong critical thinking skills is at an all-time high. The ease of viewing and sharing digital information has made us more vulnerable than ever to misinformation and disinformation. While Big Tech companies have started incorporating fact-checking systems into their platforms, flawed information is not the only way we can be misled online. With the growth of opinion content across the web has come a growth in the use of flawed reasoning, or logical fallacies. Britannica defines a logical fallacy as "erroneous reasoning that has the appearance of soundness".

People use fallacies in their arguments, both accidentally and intentionally, to try to assert their points, but do so by misstating facts, using terms incorrectly, or using an improper process of inference (Britannica). Logical fallacies are not typically "black-and-white" claims of fact. Thus, they often slip through the cracks of fact-checking systems and are free to float around online. Making matters worse, social media sites employ algorithms which curate our feeds to only show us what we want to see. This process often results in filtering out content that is not in support of our own beliefs and interests, exploiting our confirmation bias and creating personal echo chambers we may not even realize.

Since fallacies are manipulative, yet go unchecked on a very opinionated internet, it is solely up to users to recognize any faulty logic in the content they encounter.

To be able to navigate the internet mindfully and distinguish manipulative reasoning from genuine reasoning, we must have a working knowledge of logical fallacies and adequate skills to identify them.