Early childhood education is undergoing a quiet revolution that has nothing to do with touchscreens. Neither a monthly subscription nor a Wi-Fi password are necessary. It is made of cardboard and is located on a table in a Michigan preschool classroom.
Since Professor Krystyna Nowak-Fabrykowski of Central Michigan University traveled to Bologna, Italy, to present her findings at the World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s international conference in 2025, Super Me!, a matching card game created to teach empathy and emotional intelligence to children as young as three, has drawn attention in the research community. The study was small in scope, with 27 children between the ages of three and four completing 16 illustrated scenarios and responding to six questions. However, the implications seem to outweigh the sample size.
The idea behind the game is surprisingly straightforward. Children alternately match a situation to a suitable response, such as lending a helping hand to a friend who has fallen or choosing to be kind when it would be easier not to. There are illustrations on the cards. You don’t need to read. No score in the conventional sense. Instead of measuring speed or accuracy in a competitive manner, the researchers were focusing on something more difficult to gauge: children’s ability to sense other people’s emotions and their innate desire to assist.
The motivation behind this study may be more significant than the data itself. Citing developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Nowak-Fabrykowski presents play as a child’s innate framework for comprehending reality, where meaning is constructed prior to the full development of language. She contends that children aren’t just having fun when they play. They are testing social norms, developing moral frameworks, and creating something that will endure beyond the game itself. That is not what the majority of educational apps currently make.
If you walk through any preschool, you’ll notice that “learning tools” frequently resemble entertainment items dressed in flimsy academic attire. Eye-catching user interfaces, upbeat sound effects, and metrics that reassure parents without necessarily providing much information. Over the past ten years, educational apps have drawn billions of dollars in funding, but there is still surprisingly little research to support many of them. According to a 2021 review that was published in a National Institutes of Health journal, experts are generally concerned about the lack of solid proof that educational apps for kids are truly beneficial. The industry hasn’t fared well since that discovery.
Super Me! follows a completely different logic. Another person must be seated across the table for it to work. It causes friction, the positive kind where a four-year-old is forced to stop and consider the feelings of others. The findings from Nowak-Fabrykowski’s interviews revealed not only what the children knew, but also how they were starting to consider the inner lives of others. There was a noticeable variation in the scenarios that the children identified as empathetic and why. Cognitive empathy is what that is. The goal is that.
There is a perception that educational technology occasionally confuses innovation with advancement. A new platform, a new interface, a new algorithm—somewhere along the line, the question of whether kids are genuinely learning something long-lasting is quietly shuffled aside. The Super Me! research is noteworthy for how outdated it appears in that context and how certain the results seem in spite of that.
In 2026, Poznań, Poland will host the next OMEP conference. By then, Nowak-Fabrykowski should have more information. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to ignore the implications of the most talked-about early education innovation of 2025, which entails kids sitting together, flipping cards, and gradually, imperfectly, and humanely learning to see the world from another person’s perspective.
