Professor Game Podcast

This special episode is a recording of most of my talk at Serious Play Conference 2019 in Orlando, Florida. In this talk, I provide an additional perspective to the discussion of games and gamification in education and learning: the short term. Gamification and serious games are oftentimes referred to as a way to keep your users (players) engaged over the long run or at least over the medium term. I highlight how learners also receive great benefits from engaging with learning over short periods of time, in a way that allows the new information and abilities to stick over the long term.

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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Dan Salmanovich is founder and director of The Arcade Hotel. He was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and has spent most of his life in the service industry. His family got into hotels in Amsterdam and he was looking for the next best thing, where he started working in almost everything within hotels. He also did a summer school program at the Hague. Some years ago he had a hotel in Berlin and was in the process of selling it to move back to Amsterdam and it was where he decided to create The Arcade Hotel, which we'll be talking about during this episode.

Lauren Ferro has a Ph.D. in player profiling and modeling. She is currently an Adjunct Professor and researcher at Sapienza University, in Rome. She is also the co-organizer of the Unreal Engine Meetup in Rome. In addition, she created the game design resource, Gamicards, which is a prototyping tool for game experiences. At heart, she is intrigued by how we interact with the world and those in it.

Michael Matera is an engaging, fun and inspiring nationwide speaker and author, delivering keynotes, workshops and small group professional development to teachers and administration. Additionally, he is a practicing teacher. He ignites both his classroom and professional development audiences with interactive play, passion and purpose-driven learning. He helps us all focus on finding the joy in the journey of life both professionally as well as personally. He is the host and creator of the Hive Summit. As a gamification guru and moonshot thinker, Michael transforms the traditional classroom into a high-energy environment where active student engagement is paramount. Michael is an energetic trainer, who broadly shares his research, teaching methods and technological applications for the advancement of learners, teachers and administrators. As a consultant, he works with educational institutions and business to define the needs and build solutions that inspire and lead to effective change. Discover his most recent pioneering endeavors by visiting his website, mrmatera.com, listen to his podcast Well Played or have a look on his YouTube channel and remember to connect.

Dr. Karen Schrier is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Games & Emerging Media program at Marist College. She is also the director of the Play Innovation Lab. Prior to Marist College, she spent over a decade producing websites, apps, and games at Scholastic, Nickelodeon, BrainPOP, PBS/Channel 13, ESI Design and SparkNotes/Barnes & Noble. Dr. Schrier has authored or edited over 80 scholarly publications and educational materials. She is the editor of the book series, Learning, Education & Games, published by ETC Press (Carnegie Mellon), co-author of a UNESCO whitepaper on empathy and games, and co-editor of two books on games and ethics. Her latest book, Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Help Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change, was published in 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press and has been covered by Forbes, New Scientist, and Times Higher Education. Dr. Schrier has co-created many digital properties, such as Awesome Upstander, an anti-bullying mobile game and the Daytime Emmy-nominated Mission US: For Crown or Colony? For the 2018-2019 year, she worked as a Belfer Fellow with the ADL's Center for Technology & Society. She holds a doctorate from Columbia University, a master's degree from MIT, and a bachelor's degree from Amherst College.

Juan Valera Mariscal graduated from Universidad de Salamanca as a Social and Work Psychologist, is a collaborator of the project Assessment Game Delphos 3D and also the creator of the CARDS Method for communications training. He is the author of the gamification book Gamificación en la Empresa and co-author of "Conversaciones para Triunfar." Juan is also a member of the GamFed (International Gamification Confederation), was responsible for institutional relations of the Asociación Nacional de Gamificación (ANAGAM) in Spain and a co-organizer of the Gamification Spain Meetup Madrid 2014. He is now also a professor of a masters degree in gamification, a consultant and a designer who manages development teams for gamified IT projects, usually focused in HR. He is a fan of tech, writer, illustrator and amateur musician.

Richard N. Landers is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and holds the John P. Campbell Distinguished Professorship of Industrial-Organizational Psychology. His research concerns the use of innovative technologies in psychometric assessment, employee selection, adult learning, and research methods, with a recent focus on game-based assessment, gamification, artificial intelligence, unproctored and mobile Internet-based testing, virtual reality, and social media. His work has been published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior, and Psychological Methods, among others, and his work has been featured in popular outlets such as Forbes, Business Insider, and Popular Science.

With 20 years of business and management experience, Naza has been instrumental in implementing innovative approaches to development, support and delivery of online and hybrid courses and programs with national and international partners. Her team became one of the most innovative and efficient distance education centers in Canada, has grown to be a leader in digital education and one of the largest providers of university credit online courses in Ontario. Over 35 international and national organizations have recognized Digital Education Strategies (DES) work including the OLC International Award for Excellence in Institution-Wide Online Education. Naza is a lead in grant proposals and in a number of educational initiatives providing technology and operational management expertise in the development of continuing education programs.

Dustin is with his beautiful and wonderful wife Grace living in Taiwan. Dustin teaches English at a university in Taipei and works in the field of education in other various capacities, including consulting and research. He is always looking for ways to create a more engaging classroom to develop a strong classroom culture to strengthen learning. This is how "Board Gaming with Education" was founded. He contributes to the podcast as the host. He also does the website design, editing, and some marketing. You can find Dustin playing board games with friends, teaching at his university, running around Taipei training for races, jamming to music, or at any of the "Board Gaming with Education" events.