Mission: Admission

Mission: Admission is a strategic video game designed to increase college going self-efficacy and college knowledge among high school students in historically underserved districts.

In Mission: Admission, players choose a character, help them build an impressive application, and pick the colleges and scholarships they should apply to. Each game presents the player with a field of deadlines that play out in real time over the course of a week, and success requires both planning and time-management skills. The gameplay was inspired by popular Facebook games of the early 2010s, which commonly used the frustration of time-gates to drive viral behavior and microtransactions. We recognized that these mechanisms could also be used positively to force long-term planning and time management, and designed a system around training those skills. Mission: Admission uses abstract simulation to teach students about the process of college application.

Mission: Admission was developed by a team of students and faculty in collaboration with the USC Rossier School of Education, with funding from the Department of Education, The Gilbert Foundation, and TG. It was first released on Facebook in 2012 for a pilot study, then funded for a longitudinal study in 50 California schools through the Department of Education’s First in the World program that completed in 2017.

Website: https://www.gameinnovationlab.com/futurebound/ 
Download: https://gameinnovationlab.itch.io/mission-admission/ 
Also available in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.