Preparing Today's Youth for the Careers of Tomorrow - with Games
Endless CEO and Founder Matt Dalio spoke at the 2022 Games for Change Festival, which brings together developers, educators, researchers, students, and other game-changers who want to make an impact through video games or immersive media. Here, we’ve excerpted his talk, Preparing Today’s Youth for the Careers of Tomorrow - with Games.
I want to talk about how we prepare kids for the jobs of the future. Teenage kids are 13% of the current population but 100% of the future. How do we prepare them for the jobs of the next decades?
We teach them skills like coding, design, debate, collaboration and project management. Our journey to arm kids with these skills started in places like Guatemala and Brazil and Indonesia, where for about ten years, we've been building technology to teach kids around the world. And it's really focused on device access and Internet access and reaching remote communities.
In some of those communities, only 30% of math teachers are able to pass the math exam that they're teaching to. Let’s rephrase that: 70% of the math teachers fail the math exam they're teaching to. So how do you teach an entire generation the skills their own teachers don't have?
That same question actually applies in the United States, where the majority of teachers are not provided training in coding or don't know what design looks like or how to use Photoshop or how software gets built. So how can we teach the next generation to do those things?
The answer lies in the 20 hours a week that the average kid is playing video games. When you tally that up, by the time they graduate from school, that's 10,000 hours. If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, you’ll know 10,000 hours is enough to be a virtuoso at just about anything.
What if we took some of those 10,000 hours to teach kids skills that will benefit their futures? Games are so well suited to teach; they're kind of the opposite of most traditional forms of education.
At the end of the day, a game is basically a giant learning engine. You start with a tutorial, and then you get a little bit better at that challenge. And then you keep building and refining skills until you're playing the big boss. And that can be a platformer where you're jumping around. That can be a puzzle game where you're solving puzzles, or that can be any type of game where you're trying to get better at the thing you're trying to do. And in our case, we believe that you can apply that same logic to a lot of things. Games are also interactive, dynamic, and narrative-based, so they have story and stakes.
They're immersive. They are also safe places to fail. A big reason that kids struggle to learn is because they're afraid of failure. And yet a game is all about failing. It's all about not hitting the level and not hitting the level and not hitting level until you do.
In the early days of Endless, we would walk into rural schools and see kids crowded around really terrible Linux games. There would be 20 kids surrounding a computer shouting numbers at each other at a game that was basically a multiplication table wrapped in a game.
Many educational games became successful, but somewhere along the way, consumer games took off and education games stayed stagnant. Lists of “top learning games” include games that are 20 years old. There needs to be progress.
What’s holding us back?
Games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
Chocolate and broccoli: games and learning just don’t seem like they go together. Kids, when they're playing games, they want to have fun.
Kids already have so many choices on where to spend their time. Why are they going to play a learning game when they can be playing a game just for fun?
Curriculum coverage. If you're building for schools, you've got to cover everything, all grades, all subjects, all topics, and they have learning objectives and standardized tests to prepare for. That's a lot.
Overcoming the Barriers
#1: It doesn't actually take $100 million to build these games. The tools and capabilities that are there now are the reason that there is the indie game revolution. And when you look at the people who are putting the big money in, they're not going to be the ones to do this. But the indie game community, the indie game studios can be the ones that are disrupting, that are creating that catalyst.
#2 and #3: Kids are social. Games are social. Kids are curious. They want to learn. It's just that they want to learn about the things they want to learn about, not the things necessarily that school wants to teach them about in discretionary time. When I'm done with my homework, I'm done with my homework. I want to do the things I care about.
But if you go and you look at apps like Duolingo, it has 500 million downloads and 40 million active users every month, and a bunch of those who are teens and young adults wanting to learn a language. Whatever passion they may have, kids are looking ahead at their life and saying, what do I want to do with my life? Do I want to be a designer? Do I want to be an engineer?
Kids are creative. We see that in games like Minecraft, people love building. Kids start with sandcastles and Legos. There are human instincts to create, to paint, to write poems, to make. And the reason that you see the success of something like Minecraft is because it's the same instinct that Legos and sandcastles were. But what happens after that? What happens after Minecraft? What happens when people want something more sophisticated?
21st century skills, like coding, can also be taught in the same way. I discovered this every time I would interview one of our engineers. Each time I asked, “Just curious, how did you learn to code? What was your journey to it?” I would get the same answer over and over again: As a kid I loved playing video games, and one day I discovered I could hack my games.
#4: Developers and teachers. Many of the education games that are built are built by educators with the purpose of educating. We need partnerships with developers who know the core game loop, that know how to make things fun. Because making things fun is a craft. It's an art, not a science. If you're going to get a kid’s discretionary time, you need the fun. And that is game design.
What We’re Doing Now
There is making to learn and playing to learn. Mostly when we thought about games, we thought about playing to learn. You play a game and you learn through playing. But actually there's something so powerful in making to learn because when you make, you're using all of the skills of creation. And when you make in community, you're using the collaboration of partnership of what it looks like to actually build things. And if you wrap that together with a service and a community where you have guides and mentors and you create a holistic nurturing experience for you to use games to learn, we believe that it's possible to use games to teach.
See how we’re supporting the next generation of game designers at Endless Studios.
You can watch the full talk below: