Lifestyle brand, SmileyWorld has partnered with educational gaming platform, SKIDOS, on the launch of Happier Minds – a new emotional learning experience designed to give children playful ways to recognise, express and navigate everyday feelings.
Happier Minds brings emotional learning into a world children can explore through play. Using familiar SmileyWorld characters and expressions, children can check in with how they are feeling, explore stories and interactive activities, and discover simple ways to understand themselves and others.
The experience explores themes including self-awareness, resilience, kindness, social awareness and responsible choices, making conversations around emotions more approachable for young children. SmileyWorld has spent nearly 30 years helping people
express how they feel, and its library of more than 3,000 icons gives children a simple, familiar way to put a face to their emotions.
Happier Minds further extends the work that SmileyWorld has been doing in classrooms. Its Happier Schools Project gives teachers and parents lesson plans, worksheets and activity cards covering 27 core human emotions across five areas of emotional learning. It was developed with Professor Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, whose research identified those 27 distinct emotions, alongside UK education expert Jane Ballantine, and is available in 13 languages.
The launch also builds on SKIDOS’ broader commitment to supporting the whole child through learning experiences that go beyond traditional academics. Emotional well‑being has been part of the SKIDOS learning portfolio since 2023, alongside mathematics, reading, creativity and motor skills. The SKIDOS Emotional Well‑Being programme was developed with guidance from subject matter experts and is structured around the CASEL framework, supporting key skills such as self‑awareness, self‑management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision‑making.
“Learning how to understand your own emotions is just as important as learning numbers or words,” commented Aditya Prakash, founder and ceo at SKIDOS. “With Happier Minds, we wanted to make those early conversations about feelings easier for children and parents to start. SmileyWorld gives children an expressive and playful way into those conversations, while the activities encourage them to recognise how they feel, understand others and discover simple strategies they can use in everyday life.”
Janet Martin, chief product officer, lifestyle consumer products at The Smiley Company, continued: “SmileyWorld has been helping people express how they feel since 1997, and children are often the ones who need that most – they feel things long before they have the words. Our Happier Schools Project gave teachers a way to help with that. Happier Minds gives children a way to do it themselves, and SKIDOS have built a world around the icons so that naming a feeling becomes part of play rather than a lesson.”
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