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Rising Wharton and Engineering senior Harrison Chong was acknowledged by the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2026 record for social influence.
Chong was honored for his startup Jalan Journey, which develops video games for elementary college college students to construct empathy and spotlight social points starting from waste administration to autism consciousness. Since he cofounded the corporate in 2022, its video games have reached over 25,000 college students throughout Southeast Asia, in response to Forbes.
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Chong highlighted that his core objective in his sport design “has always been to teach empathy.”
“It’s just how we package and how we deliver it,” Chong informed the DP. “We don’t try to reinvent the wheel.”
For instance, Jalan Journey’s RecycleMe — a waste-sorting sport aimed to foster environmental stewardship — borrows gameplay mechanics from Overcooked, a preferred time-based cooking sport. Instead of creating recipes, college students kind recycling.
Other video games embrace Social Inequality World, which simulates the expertise of grocery purchasing on a restricted funds, and Speech Sleuths, which demonstrates communication challenges confronted by folks with mental disabilities in a Pictionary-like sport.
Chong emphasised that it’s “not possible to encapsulate everyone’s experience.” Rather, he goals to “get the conversation started and to have people think about what others are going through and then ask questions.”
To that finish, Jalan Journey collaborates with charities to make sure that its academic content material is correct and respectful. The charities present the data, which is then changed into a “fun and palatable” sport.
“There’s always that certification layer to ensure that education is at the forefront of what we do,” Chong stated. “Fun is just a way to achieve it.”
Chong was motivated to include “fun” as “a vehicle to achieve education” by interactions with college students through the COVID-19 pandemic. He and Jalan Journey cofounder Sricharan Balasubramanian spoke at faculties after beginning a volunteer nonprofit for homeless folks in Singapore, however struggled with sustaining college students’ consideration.
As a end result, Chong wished to make one thing extra “engaging” and encourage college students to be “passionate about doing good.” At first, he created a “Pokémon-like game world” the place college students might expertise a digital reproduction of the homeless shelters he visited.
“That’s how the startup started,” Chong stated. “We actually ran it once, just as a project. Then everyone was like, ‘Wait, so when are you going to do it again?’ And that’s when we decided, okay, maybe this is something that has an actual demand.”
Drawing on his expertise volunteering with homeless shelters, Chong emphasised the excellence between sympathy and empathy.
“Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone,” Chong stated. “Empathy is understanding what they’re going through, and you can’t learn empathy without experiencing it from the perspective of someone else. You have to put yourself in that person’s shoes.”
Chong added that sympathy is “simple,” whereas fostering real understanding of one other group’s struggles is harder.
“How can we get people to understand what we felt?” Chong requested. “How can we get them to be put in our shoes — to volunteer with people, to work with them, and then to understand what they are going through — not just the homeless, but any community?”
Over the summer time, Chong will proceed to work on Jalan Journey. The firm has labored with Singapore’s authorities on an upcoming sport that facilities round anti-drug abuse advocacy.
Jalan Journey can be engaged on a Steam-like engine for academic video games.
“What we realized is that if you want to be able to enable the ecosystem, we can’t change the educational games by ourselves, but we need to work with other people,” Chong stated. “We’re trying to build infrastructure for that so more people can build educational games.”
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