SBIR Phase I: Building Emotional Intelligence Through the Connected Readers Program

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will address the challenge of developing students? empathy and emotional self-awareness with a mobile-based platform. Aligning with the NSF's mission to develop innovative education programs to enhance aspects of emotional intelligence, this project will address three major pain points for young learners with far-reaching implications. First, the need to develop emotional intelligence; which has been identified as a 21st-century literacy that is crucial for younger learners to thrive. Current school climate issues with bullying and violence consistently reinforce the need to address social and emotional learning. Next, the need to integrate social and emotional learning into regular classroom activities. With the demands placed on schools for testing, having a program that integrates with what schools are already responsible should support more widespread adoption. Finally, the program addresses a widespread need to combat the deleterious effects of the current uses of social media by young students. This project will bring a positive spin to social networking that can improve the emotional intelligence skills of students The proposed innovation is an augmented reality-based experience that immerses fourth and fifth-grade students in activities designed to build their skills of emotional intelligence; namely, emotional self-awareness and empathy, as they interact with a network of peers. The key technical challenges the project must solve include: refining core methods for developing emotional self-awareness and empathy, defining and refining a user experience that teachers/parents will find educationally compelling and with which learners will love to engage, designing a curating process for learner-generated content that will ensure the safety and security of all users and developing virtual interactions that engage students in emotional skill development, and connecting activities with the materials for which students are already responsible. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.