Try a New.life

For educators

Free

One link, and every student gets a life none of them picked.

Send your class a single link and every student lands on a different life, built from the real statistics of the country they were born into. It takes about ten minutes to read, and the discussion afterwards is where the work happens.

The learning goal is empathy: what a life looks like from inside conditions nobody chose.

The exercise

What each student gets

  • Their own life, not the one next to them. A different country, a different set of odds.
  • Real figures from national statistics, with the source named on every line.
  • A closing count of how much of that life was ever theirs to decide.
  • No sign in and no account. They open the link and start reading.

Your call

What you control

  • Lifespan and survival
  • IQ
  • Sexual orientation
  • LGBT legal status
  • Marriage and children
  • Religion
  • Height and weight
  • Smoking
  • Open defecation
  • A different country per student

Nine categories can be switched off, from the IQ figure to open defecation, and whatever you drop never reaches your students. Survival off works differently: the class is drawn only from children who reached five, so no life ends early. The frame always stays: birthplace, income, education, water, power and a toilet. You also choose whether each student gets their own country. Open your own link to see what the room sees: your preview does not use up one of the class's countries.

For your school

What we store about a student

Nothing about them. The life they drew, and that is all. No name, no email, no class list. Each life becomes a page with its own address, so it still reads the same way weeks later. Class mode sits in a cookie for fourteen days, with an exit control on every page, and no student needs an account.

Set it up

Make a link for one class

Free. Set the categories in the next step. Students need no account, they just open the link.

Your class links

No links yet

Create one and it will sit here, with its settings, until you delete it.

“No child chose the desk they sit in.”

Be born again