Wrapping up 2025!
This year brought a lot of new adventures!
Product Updates
After 2 years of research and development, we launched Venom CoLab at the American Museum of Natural History in April!
In addition, we completed a total revision of BioDive! BioDive first launched in 2019 and after 5 years of gathering feedback from students and teachers, we knew we could improve it. Our Director of Design, Noelle Posadas Shang, led the revisions as she participated in the Well-Being by Design Fellowship with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.
This fall, we began the development of Trend Trackers, an interactive, personalized website to support a problem-based learning curriculum, offering students opportunities to build data literacy, digital fluency, and problem-solving skills that are critical throughout STEM subject areas. Students work together to collect samples, generate evidence, and recommend solutions to address community health problems. We’ve been testing it with small groups of students already and will bring it into schools starting in January!
Accolades
In the spring, we completed our first randomized control trial with our partners Marcy Peak. More than 1200 students participated from across the country- rural, urban, and suburban schools as well as traditional public, public charter, religious and private schools.
After final analysis, Venom CoLab (VCL) was deemed an ESSA Tier 2 product! Both VCL knowledge and teamwork scores increased significantly after using VCL.
Venom CoLab won the Trailblazer: Middle School STEM category in the 2025 Best of STEM Awards. This honor celebrates innovative tools that inspire and engage students in science, technology, engineering, and math — and we’re proud to be recognized alongside other groundbreaking resources
We were awarded a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of Health! This will fund the development of Trend Trackers as described above.
Thought Leadership
Killer Snails presented at multiple conferences this year! We gave presentations at ASU-GSV, Games for Change, Science Teachers Association of New York, the Connected Learning Summit, City of Water Day, How Things Work Conference, the Ocean Tech Summit, the New York State Marine Education Association, Video Games - The Great Connector, and EarthFest.
We also published an article in the World Economic Forum, another article with the Waterfront Alliance and published a paper called Promoting Science Identity Exploration: An Analysis of the Game Design Features in WaterWays
Partnerships
We were honored to partner with a new distributor, Locket by Games and Learning, led by an incredible team we’ve admired for years!
We also had a fantastic writeup by Teq on how to enhance their iBlocks curriculum with our content!
2025 has been a productive year and we are looking forward to 2026 which will be the start of our 10th year. We are so grateful to the many collaborators we've worked with this year!