What if kids could sharpen their emotional literacy skills while watching the shows they love? That’s the general idea behind a new app called Humie (formerly known as ThinkHumanJr) that’s soft-launching this month, right before summer break. 

The brainchild of cognitive scientists Ilya Lyashevsky and Melissa Cesarano—adjunct professors at Columbia University’s Teachers College and co-founders of New York-based techco Affectifi—the app’s user experience goes a little something like this: Kids stream episodes from some of their favorite TV shows, with playback pausing at key moments to pose questions that encourage them to consider what the on-screen characters are feeling. 

For instance, during a Bluey clip in which cousin Muffin huffs impatiently, the app briefly presents a multiple-choice question asking kids whether Muffin is grateful, hopeful, excited or annoyed. 

Other questions and activities include associating facial expressions with emotions, estimating emotional intensity during a scene, identifying causes of emotions, and even selecting emotion management strategies. In other words, it’s SEL that’s been gamified with some high-profile entertainment faces. 

“We’re taking what is traditionally a passive media-watching experience  and turning it into an active emotional-learning experience,” says Cesarano. Instead of spending the money and effort to create SEL-based content from scratch, this research-backed alternative seamlessly blends the learning with entertainment. “You can look at every single scene of a TV show, and there’s emotional content there in the interactions of the characters,” notes Lyashevsky.  

The team partnered with a US-based kids entertainment company that prefers to remain uncredited (but trust us, it’s a biggie) on an R&D phase that included conducting a randomized control study of four- to five-year-olds in May/June 2024—75% of their parents said these kids developed a better understanding of emotions from playing on the app.

Lyashevsky and Cesarano have also tested this media-based learning model on their tech platform, ThinkHumanTV—a web-based K-12 version geared towards older learners that works with streaming services as a browser extension.  

By contrast, Humie is a mobile app that directly embeds videos of popular YouTube kids content. It’s a win-win that allows the app-makers to bypass having to license content, while also providing a YouTube viewership boost to the IP owners.

At launch, Humie will offer scenes from 10 to 12 shows (including Bluey, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Octonauts, Molly of Denali, Rosie’s Rules, Arthur, Phineas and Ferb and Caillou), with new titles added regularly. While the app could be free for a limited beta period, the long-term plan is to offer a number of subscription tiers. And an upcoming expanded offering will include access to the Netflix and Disney+ web extensions.

While directly licensing content isn’t part of the team’s short-term plan,  Lyashevsky and Cesarano are looking to partner with kids content studios on cross-promotional strategies and revenue-sharing (they’ve already finalized one such deal with STEM-focused prodco Global Tinker). And longer term, the goal is to collaborate on original content.

This story originally appeared in Kidscreen’s Q2 2025 magazine issue.