SEL and Digital Citizenship in Early Primary Classrooms, Colombia

Power of Zero is proud to announce the launch of a new pilot program in Colombia that brings together social-emotional learning (SEL) and digital citizenship into a single, integrated curriculum for early primary school children. Superpowers for Early Primary launches in January 2027 and will run across the full school year in 10 to 12 public schools in and around Bogotá.

An Overlooked Stage

Children today are going online earlier than ever, often without adult supervision and well before schools or families have the tools to guide them. Yet the early years of school, ages six to eight, remain one of the most overlooked stages in both SEL and digital literacy education. Most existing programs are designed for older children, and where digital citizenship curricula do exist, they rarely account for the emotional and social development that young children need in order to make sense of what they encounter online. Superpowers for Early Primary was designed to close that gap.

Skills for Life: At School, At Home, and Online

The program is grounded in Power of Zero’s guiding philosophy that children need one consistent set of skills to navigate all parts of their lives. A child who learns to pause before reacting to a friend’s hurtful comment on the playground is building the exact same skill they will need to pause before reacting to a hurtful comment online. That is why the curriculum is designed to travel with children across school, home, and online, reinforced by teachers in the classroom and by parents at home, so that the lessons children learn are truly skills for life.

Four Superpowers for the Digital Age

The program centers on four foundational competencies: empathy, emotional regulation, resilience, and critical thinking. Each was chosen because it is developmentally appropriate for six-to-eight-year-olds and directly supports the skills children need to navigate digital spaces safely, from pausing before reacting to a hurtful message, to bouncing back from a frustrating moment in a game, to questioning whether something they see online is true. Over the course of the school year, homeroom teachers will deliver 16 story-based lessons per grade, built around the characters and episodes of Power of Zero’s animated series Héroes de Cero, alongside a teacher training pathway and a parent engagement program that extends learning into the home.

Building on Proven Results

The Colombia pilot builds directly on the success of Power of Zero’s earlier Superpowers program for kindergarten, piloted in the Philippines, which showed measurable gains in children’s resilience, emotional regulation, kindness, and critical thinking, along with greater teacher and parent confidence in guiding children’s digital lives. This new phase extends that same framework to older children for the first time, with a curriculum created from the ground up for the Colombian context.

A Partnership Rooted in Colombian Expertise

The program is being developed and delivered through a partnership that reflects Power of Zero’s commitment to local expertise and rigorous evidence: Aulas en Paz is leading curriculum co-design and cultural adaptation with Colombian teachers and children; CoSchool is creating a teacher learning jouney through in-person workshops and on its Edumoción learning platform; and an independent research team at Universidad de los Andes is leading a formative, mixed-methods evaluation to assess the program’s feasibility, cultural fit, and early signals of impact on children, teachers, and parents.

Gratitude to the Templeton World Charity Foundation

None of this would be possible without the generous support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation, whose funding is enabling Power of Zero to adapt, co-design, and evaluate this program in Colombia, as it did for the original kindergarten pilot in the Philippines. Power of Zero is deeply grateful for the Foundation’s continued partnership and its belief in the importance of teaching children character strengths at the beginning of their online lives.

Why This Matters Now

“When I was growing up, a child’s first real exposure to screens was around age four,” said Nicholas Carlisle, CEO of Power of Zero. “Today, first exposure typically comes at four months. Children are growing up online from the very start, yet the early years have been almost entirely left out of the conversation about digital citizenship. This pilot is about meeting children where they already are, giving them and the adults around them the social, emotional, and critical thinking tools they need to navigate life at school, at home, and online.”

Looking Ahead

Power of Zero and its partners see the Colombia pilot as a foundation for broader impact across Latin America, where the same gap between early childhood development and digital life exists in many countries. Findings from the pilot will be shared with Colombia’s Ministry of Education, the Jacobs Foundation’s Communities of Change network, and international partners, with a view towards regional scale.

To learn more about Superpowers for Early Primary, or to get involved, contact Power of Zero.