Rising Wharton and Engineering senior Harrison Chong was recognized by the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2026 list for social impact.
Chong was honored for his startup Jalan Journey, which develops games for elementary school students to build empathy and highlight social issues ranging from waste management to autism awareness. Since he cofounded the company in 2022, its games have reached over 25,000 students across Southeast Asia, according to Forbes.
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Chong highlighted that his core goal in his game design “has always been to teach empathy.”
“It’s just how we package and how we deliver it,” Chong told the DP. “We don’t try to reinvent the wheel.”
For example, Jalan Journey’s RecycleMe — a waste-sorting game aimed to foster environmental stewardship — borrows gameplay mechanics from Overcooked, a popular time-based cooking game. Instead of making recipes, students sort recycling.
Other games include Social Inequality World, which simulates the experience of grocery shopping on a limited budget, and Speech Sleuths, which demonstrates communication challenges faced by people with intellectual disabilities in a Pictionary-like game.
Chong emphasized that it is “not possible to encapsulate everyone’s experience.” Rather, he aims to “get the conversation started and to have people think about what others are going through and then ask questions.”
To that end, Jalan Journey collaborates with charities to ensure that its educational content is accurate and respectful. The charities provide the information, which is then turned into a “fun and palatable” game.
“There’s always that certification layer to ensure that education is at the forefront of what we do,” Chong said. “Fun is just a way to achieve it.”
Chong was motivated to incorporate “fun” as “a vehicle to achieve education” by interactions with students during the COVID-19 pandemic. He and Jalan Journey cofounder Sricharan Balasubramanian spoke at schools after starting a volunteer nonprofit for homeless people in Singapore, but struggled with maintaining students’ attention.
As a result, Chong wanted to make something more “engaging” and inspire students to be “passionate about doing good.” At first, he created a “Pokémon-like game world” where students could experience a virtual replica of the homeless shelters he visited.
“That’s how the startup started,” Chong said. “We actually ran it once, just as a project. Then everyone was like, ‘Wait, so when are you going to do it again?’ And that’s when we decided, okay, maybe this is something that has an actual demand.”
Drawing on his experience volunteering with homeless shelters, Chong emphasized the distinction between sympathy and empathy.
“Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone,” Chong said. “Empathy is understanding what they’re going through, and you can’t learn empathy without experiencing it from the perspective of someone else. You have to put yourself in that person’s shoes.”
Chong added that sympathy is “simple,” while fostering genuine understanding of another community’s struggles is more difficult.
“How can we get people to understand what we felt?” Chong asked. “How can we get them to be put in our shoes — to volunteer with people, to work with them, and then to understand what they are going through — not just the homeless, but any community?”
Over the summer, Chong will continue to work on Jalan Journey. The company has worked with Singapore’s government on an upcoming game that centers around anti-drug abuse advocacy.
Jalan Journey is also working on a Steam-like engine for educational games.
“What we realized is that if you want to be able to enable the ecosystem, we can’t change the educational games by ourselves, but we need to work with other people,” Chong said. “We’re trying to build infrastructure for that so more people can build educational games.”
