“City of Immigrants” Wins Parents’ Choice Award

February 16, 2016

City of Immigrants—the fourth in the Mission US series of free online history games produced by public television station WNET/Thirteen in collaboration with ASHP/CML, the game company Electric Funstuff, and the Educational Development Center—just received the Parents’ Choice Gold Award in the Spring 2016 website competition. Issued by the Parents’ Choice Foundation, the oldest nonprofit guide in the U.S. for outstanding children’s media, Gold Award winners are judged as “the highest quality, most appealing products in their genre,” the criteria including the “highest production standards, [and conveying] universal human values.”

Launched in 2015, City of Immigrants immerses players in the daily life and struggles of Lena Brodsky, a 14 year old Russian Jewish immigrant, on the Lower Eastside of Manhattan during the first decade of the twentieth century, and culminates in the massive 1909 shirtwaist strike. With 1.3 million registered users in middle-school classrooms across the country (including 50,000 teachers), the Mission US programs have been recognized as engaging resources, rich in social history, that promote rigorous learning about the U.S. past, and, along with the Parents’ Choice Award, have won the Most Significant Impact Award from Games for Change, the Japan Prize honoring the best of educational media, and the Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Technology Review.