TechCrunch
If You Can Company, a new startup from EA founder Trip Hawkins that uses gameplay to teach children social and emotional learning (SEL) skills, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Greylock Partners with Almaz Capital participating. Previously, the company raised $2.8 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Founder’s Fund, Maveron and several others. This brings the startup’s total funding to $9.3 million, and Greylock partner David Sze has joined the board of directors at If You Can Company.
When Hawkins was thinking about developing an educational game, he realized there was a big gap in a title that would provide social and emotional learning skills. In fact, research supporting SEL, which is the discipline of learning how to understand and manage one’s emotions, now proves this learning can be taught and that this set of skills not only helps students learn in school, but also helps them to develop into happier, healthier children. Hawkins, who has four children himself, tells me that there are some schools that have a curriculum around this type of learning, and he started thinking about how to incorporate this into a game.
Similar to how Hawkins built EA’s Madden Football, by incorporating player stats and the NFL rules into the experience and gameplay, he is integrating SEL curriculum to better serve children. Hawkins drew from several academic and research publications, as well as school-based SEL programs to inform its learning content and goals, beginning with the State of Illinois (first to develop freestanding, comprehensive state standards in SEL) and The Nueva School (pioneers in the field of SEL).