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Our team collectively crafts groundbreaking, evidence-based solutions around gambling, gaming, and consumer activities.
Connect with our team to learn more about trainings, customized offerings, and partnership opportunities.
The gambling landscape is changing faster than youth prevention efforts can keep up. Sports betting, daily fantasy sports, and prediction markets are increasingly woven into the sports, media, and digital environments young people engage with every day. Yet traditional health education curricula often overlook gambling, leaving educators and youth-serving professionals without the training and resources needed to address these emerging risks.
Schools need more than awareness. They need evidence-based, engaging, and practical prevention programming that reflects today’s gambling landscape and is easy to implement, scalable, and sustainable.
Launched in 2025, Not Just A Game is an evidence-based, age-appropriate, and culturally responsive youth gambling-harm prevention program and curriculum focused on sports betting, daily fantasy sports, and emerging forms of gambling, including prediction markets.
The initiative was made possible through the leadership of the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General, which recognized the growing need for youth sports betting prevention and supported the development and program pilot.
Not Just A Game bridges a critical gap between the rapidly evolving gambling landscape and the prevention education resources available to schools and youth-serving organizations. Our approach combines research expertise, practical implementation, and ongoing evaluation to make youth gambling prevention accessible, effective, and sustainable.
Not Just A Game is a four, 45-60 -session curriculum designed to integrate seamlessly into middle and high school health and wellness education. Through interactive, student-centered learning and lived-experience storytelling, the curriculum equips young people with the knowledge and skills to think critically about sports betting, recognize potential risks, and make informed decisions.
The curriculum is designed to:
Not Just A Game uses a flexible train-the-trainer model to prepare health and wellness educators to confidently deliver the curriculum in their own classrooms and communities. Educators receive training led by subject-matter experts, along with the ready-to-teach curriculum materials and resources needed to support implementation. Ongoing support helps educators translate the curriculum into engaging, age-appropriate learning experiences for their students.
Since its launch, more than 2,500 young people aged 12-18 have participated in Not Just a Game through middle and high schools and community-based organizations. Evaluation of the Phase II 2026 program demonstrated strong results among participating high school students: 93% learned something new, 85% could identify all warning signs of a gambling problem, 74% would recommend the program to a peer, and 65% reported they would wait until the legal age to gamble. Findings also showed meaningful improvements in gambling knowledge, attitudes, and media literacy, including reduced beliefs that gambling is harmless, an easy way to make money, or appropriate for young people.
Are you a middle or high school health/wellness educator or school administrator interested in bringing Not Just A Game to your students? Click the form, linked above, to express interest in an upcoming, in person, Train-the-Trainer opportunity in your state. Contact youth@macgh.org for more information.
“As teen sports betting rises, Mass. rolls out a new classroom lesson” – Boston.com “Mass. schools doubling down on education to protect boys from gambling problems” -CommonWealth Beacon / The Hechinger Report
Our team collectively crafts groundbreaking, evidence-based solutions around gambling, gaming, and consumer activities.
Connect with our team to learn more about trainings, customized offerings, and partnership opportunities.