SBIR Phase I: College Bound Video Game

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The broader/commercial impacts of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will result from the production of a useful game, called College Bound, that will entice youth to use their gaming time to learn how to navigate the college preparation, college-admissions, and financial-aid processes. This assistance could help in addressing the problem of an inadequate number of counselors in high schools that serve large minority populations. Studies have shown that underserved high school students see a counselor for less than 20 minutes a year. Since is also known that young people between the ages of 8-18 spend 7.5 hours a day engaged with media- either playing video games or watching television a game platform may enable minority students, who make up less than 4% of undergraduate enrollees in the national four-year colleges, to prepare for college attendence. The College Bound game seeks to recoup some of this screen time for positive benefits such as improving preparedness of the minority students to access higher education, and meeting future workforce demands in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM).This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project focuses on assisting underrepresented students in learning about what it takes to get college admission, how to prepare for it, and what financial aid is available to afford the education using a gaming environment. The project will focus on measuring students' knowledge about the college application process as the player navigates through different levels of the game. Knowledge about the college application process includes a) information about admission criteria and deadlines, b) the college acceptance and enrollment processes, and c) the ability to pay for college through scholarships, loans, work programs, and/or personal savings. Throughout the pilot phase, the project will develop reliable and valid evaluation tools to measure student learning in the game setting at each level of the College Bound game. These evaluation tools might reflect not only student learning performance but also boost college enrollment outcomes. These measures may also enable the school and other stakeholders to understand students' gaps and help strengthen students’ pathways into college.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.