Taking Tilli to the classroom
The panel discussion at the launch
“This is a scary situation Having 7 and 8-year-olds coming in to the world with excessive cases of early childhood trauma creates a generation of adults who are withdrawn, depressed, sad and unable to reach their full developmental potential,” says Kavindya Thennakoon, co-founder of the game-based, Social-Emotional Learning tool, ‘Tilli’.
Funded by UNICEF and created in Sri Lanka Tilli has been quickly recognised overseas. Within the span of 15 months, Tilli has reached over 5000 learners and received recognition at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference 2023 in Texas, USA, one of the largest education technology conferences in the world, winning the Launch Award and the Impact Award, the first startup outside North America to receive the latter.
The launch of ‘Tilli for Classrooms’ in collaboration with the Good Market on April 8 saw a panel discussion with Dr. Sujata Gamage, Co-founder of Education Forum Sri Lanka, Achala Samaradiwakara, Co-founder of The Good Market, Ravinath Peiris, Managing Director Royal International School and Buddhini Withana, Senior Technical Advisor at Save The Children.
School closures due to COVID -19 caused huge social and emotional learning consequences in children due to spending critical developmental years in isolation, Kavindya explained. This is termed an adverse childhood experience and when those affected become adults they could experience financial insecurity, substance abuse and crippling health.
Tilli was developed in Sri Lanka and incubated at Stanford University to aid children aged five-10 years in developing fundamental abilities including empathy, critical thinking, and meta-cognition. Meta-cognition, Kavindya explains, is the act of thinking about one’s own thinking. It serves as the foundation for a variety of abilities, including those linked to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and social-emotional development.
Tilli’s emphasis on meta-cognition assisted teaching helps children gain a greater sense of their own emotions to think critically and empathetically about the world around them, and solve issues imaginatively. It employs interactive gaming elements and compelling stories to assist children in learning, applying, and internalising critical skills, mindsets, and tools.
By combining emerging technologies and natural language processing to create play-based ways to track and access social-emotional learning outcomes and cognitive growth, Tilli provides teachers and parents with data-backed learning tips and methods to help children.
Buddhini Withana shared a working definition of what social emotional learning is, explaining that “it’s a process that helps children acquire and develop particular skills that help them manage and regulate their emotions, develop empathy toward others, develop positive relationships, set positive goals and be able to process and retain information.”
“The issue is, we go to school- but we fail to learn how to manage relationships, we fail to learn how to be happy, we fail to learn how to feel our feelings and most importantly, how to manage our feelings,” Kavindya adds.
The launch of ‘Tilli for Classrooms’ introduced its new addition, a comprehensive 5 level programme designed for elementary learners from kindergarten to Grade 5. Nine core modules have been designed to be taught in 30–45-minute learning sessions, with 1 module per month including a 5-minute social emotional learning activity. The Tilli learning kit created for this purpose includes a Social Emotional Learning board game and dice, reflection and mindfulness activity books, emotion, coping strategies and scenario cards, interactive learning books, the content of which has been embedded in learning and behavioral sciences, says Kavindya.
Adding that learning should not be limited to the classroom, Kavindya says that for every module completed in the classroom Tilli offers a gamified module which can be completed at home which can help foster these behaviours in children over time.
For more information visit
www.tillikids.com where learning
kits can also be purchased online.
Tilli is available for download
on Google Play.
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