EverFi & The Game Agency Win “Best of Show” at ELearning Guild’s 2018 DevLearn DemoFest for The Creation of the Compassion Project
Last week the eLearning Guild recognized EverFi, an innovative education technology company and The Game Agency, an educational software developer with the “Best of Show” award for the creation of The Compassion Project, a game-based course created to provide educators with the tools they need to teach and reinforce concepts such as compassion, empathy, and mindfulness to 2nd-4th grade students.
The course, which has been released into 20,000 schools across North America, aligns with state educational standards and includes 15 lessons that take about 20 minutes each to finish.
Learners take on the role of a student whose goal is to bring emotional awareness to a group of individually unique in-game characters. Each conflict presented allows students to explore, make mistakes, but ultimately leads them through to resolution. Students are often asked to connect these fictional scenarios with personal and real-life situations. These connections become building blocks for dealing with real-life social conflicts, teaching students the skills necessary for developing emotional connections they would not otherwise learn from a textbook. The course also helps students understand the importance of self-care, mindfulness and staying calm in stressful and frustrating situations.
After each lesson is complete, students receive a score or grade to reflect how they did. If they aren’t satisfied with their grade, they are able to take the lessons over to score higher. Once the program is completed, students receive a certificate to recognize their accomplishments.
“We showed this course to hundreds of instructional designers at DevLearn and each of them were blown away” said Stephen Baer, Managing Partner at The Game Agency. “The skills we have addressed in this course are fundamental in society, making our entire team feel proud about what we’ve built. We couldn’t be more excited by this course or our partnership with EverFi. It is a perfect example of why our team loves coming to work every day.”
“With so much emphasis placed on improvements in math and science, skills like compassion often receive less classroom time” said Tom Davidson, CEO of EverFi. “This unintended trade-off may be short-sighted, as compassion is an important social-emotional skill that begins to develop in early childhood and is essential for lifelong health and success. Learning compassion increases students’ own sense of wellbeing and improves the learning environment for all learners. EVERFI’s new SEL program, The Compassion Project, is the first comprehensive, no-cost program designed to help educators facilitate lessons around fundamental SEL skills for students in grades 2-4, focusing on the complex but critical skill of compassion.”
For more information, please visit: https://thecompassionproject.com/.
About EverFi
EVERFI, Inc. is the leading education technology innovator that empowers K-12, higher education, and adult learners with the skills needed to be successful in life. Its comprehensive critical skills platform is focused on Financial Education, Digital Citizenship, STEM Career Readiness, Diversity and Inclusion, Entrepreneurship, Character Education, and Health and Wellness. The EVERFI Education Network powers more than 3,300 partner organizations across all 50 states and Canada and annually reaches 6 million learners.
About The Game Agency
The Game Agency is a software development company focused on creating training games for K-College and Fortune 500 companies. They offer custom game development as well as two SaaS solutions, The Training Arcade™, an intuitive game builder that enables anyone to create, publish, and share training games easily and affordably and Motivate Cloud™, a gamified learning platform.
