We're retiring Digital Compass in June 2024.

Heads up! Digital Compass will be retired on June 30, 2024. But don't worry—we still have you covered! Middle school students can watch our interactive videos on Digital Connections.

Until then, feel free to introduce students in grades 6–8 to Digital Compass™ by Common Sense Education. The award-winning game is an innovative way to give students the freedom to explore how decisions they make in their digital lives can affect their relationships and futures.

Through the suite of popular choose-your-own-path games, students play through the perspective of one of eight main characters, each of whom is facing a different digital citizenship dilemma. The varied story paths and multiple decision points encourage students to play repeatedly in order to explore alternative courses of action. Games are also available in Spanish.

 

FAQs

Digital Compass can only be used on desktop or laptop web browsers. We retired the iOS and Android apps in October 2019 when we did an accessibility upgrade to Digital Compass. We also converted Digital Compass from Flash to HTML5 at that time. 

We recently added the following accessibility features to Digital Compass.

  • Keyboard-only controls
  • Mouse-/Touch-only controls
  • Screen reader emulation
  • High-legibility font option
  • Visual contrast edits

These features can be accessed from the gear icon on the "Anywhere" home screen. See the Educator Guide for more details.

You can use Digital Compass in one of two ways: 

  1. Use Digital Compass as a stand-alone way to onboard students to digital citizenship. 
  2. For a blended learning approach, use Digital Compass and follow up with a suggested teacher-facilitated lesson from our free K–12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum.

Digital Compass will save where your students left off in a storyline, but to log back in to complete the game, students will have to use the same device and browser, and login credentials. All data is lost when the web browser cache is cleared.

Each story takes a minimum of 45 minutes; so eight stories x 45 minutes = six hours. Each story has nine endings, 23 decisions, and 32 paths, which makes for a total of 50 possible combinations! Each story also includes a skills-based mini-game.

As students work through a module, a scorecard records their progress. Each scorecard has two types of scores: 

  • Progress Score: The percentage is based on the number of paths completed (x/32). 
  • Game Score: For each mini-game, students receive three scores and time recordings (first, last, and best).

There are separate scorecards for each story and a summary one they can view from the home screen. To monitor student progress, students will need to print or save their scorecards.

Since Digital Compass is web-based, students can play on any laptop or desktop, but will have to start over when using a different device. The progress students make on one device will not be saved when they play on another device. That being said, encouraging students to play at home and share the games with their parents is a great way to introduce parents to the topics Digital Compass addresses.

The short answer is, yes! Digital Compass does not collect personal information. Players can enter a short username to begin and continue play, but this is stored locally and not collected by or accessible to Common Sense. If directed by teachers, users may print or save scores. We do not collect such screenshots. We support the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and we do not collect personal information from children under 13. Click here to read our privacy policy.