On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on the TechTO stage in 2024. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Robin ↗
In their words
About 90% of Americans say that they did not get prepared for the real world with sexual health education, so we built a game called Likely Story that is aiming to change this.
Teachers set teens up to play this game in groups so they can be anonymous and safely play this game by facing different scenarios and responding.
Ultimately the goal with this is to power a dashboard for students and schools.
Quick answers
What did Robin Newman build?
Likely Story, a game that teenagers play in class in anonymous groups, answering scenarios about love, sex and online safety. Underneath the awkward-relationship surface, the content is built on how traffickers use romantic relationships to coerce girls. Victim Services Ontario names her, with Michelle Kwon and Meghan Lazier, as a creator of the graduate-school project it grew out of.
What did she demo at TechTO?
An AI chat companion added to the game at TechTO's Build & Tell hackathon in June 2024, which opened Collision week. A player who finishes a scenario can ask it follow-up questions — she used "how do I remove an unwanted photo from the internet" on stage — and it answers with reporting steps and support resources. She said it was built in an hour.
Where did Likely Story come from?
A graduate-school project called Say No More, created by Michelle Kwon, Meghan Lazier and Robin Newman. It won a $20,000 Sappi Ideas That Matter grant in 2015 to pilot 500 copies of a card game, went digital in 2020 under the name That's Sus, and is now published as Likely Story by Studio Jayne with Ontario victim-services agencies.
What is Robin Newman doing now?
Not established. Her work on Likely Story is documented by Victim Services Ontario and by the game's own site, but no citable source establishes her current role, and this page does not publish from LinkedIn or contact-data aggregators.