The iLit Project aspires to teach students the basic skills of Information Literacy, problem solving, and critical thinking skills.

In this Project, the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is working with Carnegie's Universities Libraries to create a unique, novel and highly engaging web based game.

For many students, internet search engines have replaced more traditional approaches to research. Yet most of this information comes in unfiltered formats, raising questions about its authenticity, validity, and reliability and posing new challenges for evaluation, comprehension, and learning. Only a small percentage of web content is peer-reviewed and fact-checked. It is left up to the user to evaluate and contextualize that which many sources put forward as facts. Teachers are increasingly worried that their students lack a clear mental map for effectively finding, evaluating, and integrating information. They are looking for ways to impart the set of technological and cognitive capacities that constitute information literacy.

This project aims to ensure that all students develop skills and the intellectual framework needed to identify and evaluate sources of digital information and then to comprehend and integrate the material. It will cultivate and sharpen skills in the use of information technology, as well as in more general realms of problem-solving and critical-thinking.