Common core standards were established by working committees in the United States and Canada. Surprisingly, all 10 provinces are represented in the National Science Teachers Association. They have monthly meetings in which I have participated. They established certain common core competencies in science to try to give people across the board and across North America an idea of how you can harmonize and bring people up to speed.
Canada has less of a problem than the United States does, which constantly scores 28 and 31, but Canada is slipping as well. The idea is that of 40 hours in front of the screen, about 15 to 17 hours per week are spent playing just video games. You can reference my TEDx talk on that if you google my name.
The science shows that if you take some of that time away, you're actually able to increase base level scores. The goal is that if you can get the failing bottom 20% of grade 9 students to a passing rate, it will raise the GDP of a country by approximately 2.5% to 3% over every five years. This has been shown in the UNESCO study I showed you. This is huge and a very practical reason to do it.
We also don't want people falling behind generally, so we have an initiative with the MacArthur and the Mozilla foundations to recognize common core standard achievement in the games that we develop. We developed what's called the digital badging system with Mozilla, the Firefox people, and the MacArthur and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, that will recognize achievement in video games with common core standards. We are bringing that with NASA and our other partners into the Starlite project that we are working on now.