iThirve Games Empathy Jam at DigiPen

This Event Report concerns the Empathy Jam iThrive Games held in cooperation with DigiPen Institute of Technology in Seattle, WA, on September 15-17, 2017. iThrive Games is a nonprofit that exists to create meaningful opportunities for teens to enhance the knowledge, mindsets, and skills they need to thrive across development, to engage actively in their learning and in their community, and to be healthy. We embrace the positive potential of games, and find a strengths-based approach to be especially important to this work. Game Jams are an important way that iThrive can educate and perform developer outreach in accordance with our mission. We do game jams at universities and regional game festivals, with the goal of bringing together people to build games together using our science based, expert-developed design resources (available for free download at the iThrive Games website: www.ithrivegames.org) to help developers make games toward prosocial outcomes. Our jams not only demonstrate what kinds of games can result from these design concepts, but are also important events to foster ongoing collaboration and to facilitate mentoring relationships at multiple levels. These jams also allow us to test and refine our design resources with the help of the people they are intended for.