Game Changers

Game Changers is a comprehensive library of concise, fun-to-play web games, each targeted to a specific early literacy curriculum objective. In partnership with the Success for All Foundation and FlickerLab, Sirius Thinking has combined these games into playlists with short, highly entertaining videos, songs, and stories from Between the Lions that provide instruction in the exact same educational goals; and has developed an innovative web-based Learning Portal to make these materials accessible to early literacy students in the classroom and at home, at precisely the right moment to reinforce their learning. The Portal also tracks kids’ successes (or failures) on each targeted game, whether they play it in class, after school, in a tutoring session, or at home. All components have been designed to work on any platform, including tablets, laptops, and smartphones. The main intended users of Game Changers are kindergarten and first grade teachers and students (and their parents) in elementary schools, especially those that receive Title I funding.   

Starting in the 2025-2026 school year, we will be offering Game Changers as a new, fully-integrated component of SFA’s research-proven Reading Between the Lions first-grade classroom program, and as a self-contained supplementary literacy program to schools not currently using Success for All resources. For the non-SFA version, we are partnering with First Book, who plan to make our program available to its membership through its not-for-profit First Book Marketplace.

In a recent field trial conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Game Changers was demonstrated to have a significant instructional impact. In just seven weeks of exposure to the intervention, fully 32% more students in the experimental group achieved full mastery of target first-grade literacy skills than those in the control group.

We are grateful to the US Department of Education for providing funding for this exciting project.

Click above to watch a Game Changers demo.