Lore
Overcoming Obstacles | Launch Time
We’ve got another launch to tell you about (cue the launch music, aka Skyline Chili!) – this time for a life skills education non-profit called Overcoming Obstacles. They provide a full (school) year curriculum to teach students how to make goals, how to solve problems, how to manage time, how to address bullying, how to be a good citizen, how to work together and more – completely free of charge.
Yes, FREE. No hidden fees. No “later” fees. Educators just create an account and download the curriculum. We really wanted to highlight this feature, so we placed it as a sticky footer site-wide (FREE FOREVER teaser seen above).
The Overcoming Obstacles founding story is one of personal struggle and perseverance, and nothing short of world-changing. The founder, Jill Chalsty was bullied growing up and later in life, as an adult, bumped into one former bully. The woman deeply regretted bullying Jill all those years ago and had grown into a respected professional, teaching life skills to at-risk students to prevent the same type of bullying she had once caused. That’s when the lightbulb turned on.
Jill realized that millions of children weren’t being taught social and emotional skills at home. And hardly any schools were teaching it in the classroom. So, where were students supposed to learn the vital lessons that could literally change their lives? The answer is through the Overcoming Obstacles life curriculum.
The Overcoming Obstacles curriculum has been vetted through real classroom experiences and numerous research studies. It’s proven that students who are taught life skills are less likely to drop out of school, bully or get bullied, become violent, commit crimes, suffer from substance abuse, poverty or health issues. In fact, there’s so much evidence of its success, it was hard to narrow down the statistics we wanted to brag about. Check out a few below and more here.
Favorite Animations
(1)
The coolest feature is the subtle animation of changing a slanted line between panels turning to a straight line on scroll. Very philosophic to the change that happens to students as they learn the curriculum. You’ll have to check out the site to see!
(2)
Definitely take a look at the animation on The Issue page where the sentence animates to be 3 sentences in one. Whaaaattt??! “Without life skills, students struggle / suffer / fail.” Such an impactful statement with great execution to bring levity to a nationwide situation.
(3)
Another favorite animation trick on the Overcoming Obstacles site is the button animation we used alongside the icon / headline / subheading treatment on the home page. The horizontal line after the headline expands to reveal a button on rollover.
Before rollover
On rollover
More Overcoming Obstacles Highlights
With the curriculum being widely used across the United States (all 50 states!) and worldwide (60 countries!), there were plenty of testimonials from former students, educators, leadership and government officials (what up, Dick Riley?). To accommodate the long list of testimonials, they were placed near the footer on most pages and populate randomly on page load.
Oh, and they have their own app to help teachers stay organized while teaching the curriculum and customize plans for their classrooms.
We color-coded the portal so that when you are logged into the site, you’ll easily be able to tell if you are looking at the high school or middle school curriculum, resources, or webinars tab. All the headline backgrounds will update to be the same color as the tab you are on.
A new feature for the site is a Favorites collection that will put any starred / favorited modules together for quick access.
The entire site, including the portal, is fully responsive, so you can access any module or your favorites on-the-go.
Lastly, we compiled several video loops to play in the background of the two video teasers. Both very engaging, the video on The Issue page pulls at heart strings while the video on the Get Involved page is heart-warming in-classroom footage triggering appropriate emotions for the content on both pages.