Professor Game Podcast

Michael Cosimini is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and an attending physician at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. He is a contributor and associated producer of the pediatric continuing medical education podcast Pediatrics Reviews and Perspectives and the designer of Empiric Pediatric, a 2-4 player card game used to teach guideline-based antibiotic use for medical students and residents.

Amany Annaggar is a researcher at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in the chemistry education department and the founder of Sci2Play. Her Ph.D. research is about Gamification and serious games as assessment tools of problem-solving competence in chemistry education. Besides her Ph.D. research, she worked as a tutor and lab assistant at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and on 2 EU projects in science education (Inspiring science education & Ark of Inquiry). Currently, she is preparing for her Ph.D. defense and also working on her Sci2Play business idea to start it officially.

Yu-kai Chou is an Author and International Keynote Speaker on Gamification and Behavioral Design. He is the Original Creator of the Octalysis Framework, and the author of Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. He is currently President of The Octalysis Group and the Founder of Octalysis Prime, a Gamified Mentorship Platform. Yu-kai has been a regular speaker/lecturer on gamification and motivation worldwide, including at organizations like IDEO, Google, Stanford University, LEGO, Tesla, Boston Consulting Group, Turkish Airlines, the governments of UK, Singapore, South Korea, Kingdom of Bahrain, and many more. His work has affected over 1 Billion users' experiences across the world. Yu-kai was one of the earliest pioneers in Gamification, starting his work in the industry in 2003. In 2015, Yu-kai was rated #1 among the "Gamification Gurus Power 100" by RISE, and was also awarded the "Gamification Guru of the Year" Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017 by the World Gamification Congress and the Gamification Europe Conference. He has helped a variety of companies, from seed stage startups to Fortune 500 companies such as LEGO, Uber, Volkswagen/Porsche, Sberbank, eBay, Fidelity Investments, AIG Japan, Verizon, and more. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, The World Journal, PBS, NBC, and many more.

Albert van der Meer is a Creative Gamification Consultant with aeStranger, which operates from and is based in the Netherlands. His lies specifically in narrative, visual entertainment and storytelling. With these skills and knowledge, Albert has helped businesses, educational institutions, and other corporate environments to better improve team cooperation and develop deeper, more meaningful learning experiences through the use of narrative and gameful design techniques. Before starting aeStranger, Albert worked several years as a media producer, a team-building facilitator and as a freelance filmmaker and producer in Europe and the UK. After a successful career in helping business schools, businesses, music and film talents, he decided to change careers and be a full-time gamification consultant and teambuilding facilitator. Albert now helps various institutions and individuals with delivering better learning experiences for their teams and clients. Albert also co-authored a book on gamification, called: Press Start: Using Gamification to Power-up your Marketing. The book offers straightforward advice and immediate applicability of marketing & gamification techniques. It's aimed at marketers who wish to fully engage their customers in a positive and meaningful manner using game techniques.

After spending ten years in strategy in the wireless and tablet groups for Intel, Scott was bitten viciously by the board gaming bug and left to pursue his passion. Five years prior he joins with North Star Games to startup a new studio focused on making great digital board games. Scott now runs the development team and is the product manager for North Star Digital Studios. Evolution Board Game was the studio's first release, and Evolution: Education Edition now joins it as a digital board game targeting the education and learning space.

Dr. Teresa Chan is an associate professor at McMaster University. Currently, she is the Assistant Dean, Program for Faculty Development in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster. She is also the Director of the RCPSC Clinician Educator Area of Focused Competency Diploma program, and the Competency Committee Co-Director for the RCPSC emergency medicine residency program. Additionally, she serves as the Social Media Lead for the McMaster Department of Medicine. Dr. Chan is also interested in developing medical education innovations (and evaluating them!). For instance, she has co-developed and is evaluating a serious game about emergency department flow called GridlockED (www.gridlockedgame.com)! In her free time, Dr. Chan enjoys writing music. You can follow her online as @TChanMD on Twitter, or check out her work at www.tchanmd.com.

Vince Siu is the Co-founder and Managing Partner at Press Start Hong Kong, a games consultancy with a mission to change the world through play and games, and leads Press Start Academy, its after-school education arm. He is also the Founder and CEO of Epiphany & Labs, a boutique innovation consultancy with a social conscience. Outside of work, in a voluntary capacity, Vince serves as Vice Curator of the Hong Kong hub of the Global Shapers Community, a youth leadership initiative of the World Economic Forum.

This episode is quite different, it is the audio taken from the live stream that Dustin Staats and I did on Facebook and Instagram. These show notes will also be different, given that the conversation mostly unstructured, except for the questions that we prepared beforehand and that I mention below. Right after that, I'm going to mention some resources that relate to the move to online for educators in general, though of course given my stakes in higher education there will probably be more in that regard. Enjoy!

Clark Aldrich is an education technology thought leader - the author of five books and developer of patent and award-winning projects. He currently builds custom Short Sims for organizations using a revolutionary methodology he has pioneered or helps them build their own, through www.shortsims.com. He is also the host of an audio series called Education X Media (www.edbymedia.com) about evolving pedagogy in academics, corporations, and the military. Clark has just released a few chapters from his newest book, on the topic of Short Sims, at shortsims.com/handbook.

An average day for Clark consists of constructing shorts Sims for various clients and so his goal is to always have a bunch of very different clients, everything from military to academic and non-profits. This consists of interviewing subject matter experts, taking notes, scaffolding out sims and creating them.

One of Clark's favorite failures is one time he had a very large organization and they wanted him to create a custom leadership simulation for them. Clark tried to make it as much like a computer game in terms of graphics, animation and underlying algorithms but, as a result of that decision, the process ended up taking a lot longer than it should have and cost more for him and the client and the effect was never as good as he had hoped it was.

An early success story of Clark's was the design of a product called 'virtual leader', one of his most famous simulations as well as the highest number of people that have played it. He wanted to create a leadership simulation that was fully game-like and so got a team together and they created 30,000 lines of code, got some game animators and it took a year of incredibly hard work, even working on Christmas morning and his birthday to create it.

This led to a great product and they were able to deploy it in a bunch of different environments including the military but also corporations and academics. It won a bunch of awards and made a lot of money, for Clark a great success.

Clark hands this success to perseverance, in his words "we bit off more than we could chew by a long shot… as a team, we just stuck it out and would not accept failure". They brought on some insanely talented people from the programming side and from the computer animation side. Having access to some real world-class talent who are able to take some time out of their real schedule made all the difference for them if any of 7 or 8 different people who are involved in it were not committed, Clark thinks, it would have failed.

Clark's favorite game technique is the learning curve in level design. "How do you create a sim where the first level, the first time someone sits down is self-evident in terms of how to play? The second level is a tiny bit harder, the third level a tiny bit harder. Every single time we're just slowly expanding people's skill, slowly allowing them to become more and more comfortable" He thinks this is an incredibly powerful technique from the computer game world that we need to apply to educational content.

One of Clark's favorite practices is creating short simulations or a "simulation of your simulation". By creating an interactive storyboard of a game it means you don't have to make the triple-a game, which is incredibly expensive and hard to change once you've built it, and you can take your interactive storyboards and then try that with audiences meaning you know if they love it and you're on the right track to make a full game. He thinks this is a productive first step, you can create the graphics on PowerPoint, you can use clip art and you can do it in a short time by yourself with no fundraiser.

Two of Clark's favorite games to play are Fallout 4 and Robotron, the old arcade game.

Clark would recommend Peter Shea to be on the podcast, who is a very deep thinker when it comes to educational experiences and trying to figure out the right path for education. One book Clark wrote is 'unschooling rules' which is trying to deconstruct the school experience and rebuild it from elements that exist today as opposed to 100's of years ago. Peter is a colleague of mine who plays with 'what is the shape of content going to be in the future'.

Clark probably spent 30 years of his life just reading but over time the format itself became increasingly frustrating for him and now prefers to consume most of his content through podcasts, even the book he last wrote was written more as a reference book to not be in the linear style.

In Clark's opinion, his superpower is "trying to distill something to its essence" one example he gave was when he was building for the Gates Foundation, making some open-source textbooks on economics, the question was about demand curve. "How do you take a demand curve and help people learn?". In Clark's opinion by creating the right experience you don't have to teach anything; you don't have to say it. After 5 minutes of playing it you know, you've created demand curve and it becomes incredibly self-evident what a demand curve is.

Clark's last piece of advice is just to go and get a lot of experience under your belt as well as using the short sim approach to test your ideas. Put yourself in as many situations as possible and deal with as many problems as possible. Build all your skills and understand as much as possible.

Clark [at] shortsims [dot] com is Clark's email and that's the best place to get a hold of him. You can also go to the web page www.shortsims.com.

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Peter Williamson is a professional golfer turned social entrepreneur who sees physical games as a way to catalyze conversations and problem-solving. Based in Washington DC, Peter started a creative agency in 2018 called Game Genius, which focuses on supporting the local region through non-digital play. The company designs custom games, workshops, and public events to help people enjoy what they do while building community awareness. To date, Game Genius has served over 100 organizations and designed 2 city-wide treasure hunts, with game projects addressing topics like toxic partisanship, mental health, environmental behavior change, financial literacy, and creative philanthropy.