Endless Studios: Coding & Game Design for Young Learners

Speaker A 00:00:22

The Average kid spends 10,000 hours playing video games by the time they graduate from school.

Speaker A 00:00:27

That's a lot of playing.

Speaker A 00:00:29

But the interesting thing is that the number one trend in video games over the last 15 years is creation.

Speaker A 00:00:37

Minecraft, a user generated content platform, a creation platform, they call them UGC platforms.

Speaker A 00:00:43

Roblox, a UGC platform, even Fortnite, which is a shooting game, has converged on a UGC platform where you can create your own levels.

Speaker A 00:00:51

And they've taken that and brilliantly made it into a pathway that takes you into a game engine, a real industry standard, standard game engine.

Speaker A 00:00:59

And so the insight was just so simple.

Speaker A 00:01:01

Let's take you from player to creator and in the process, you're going to learn how to create software in a knowledge centric, digital, centric, AI centric future.

Speaker A 00:01:12

By the way, as we look at educating en masse, you have to make infinitely scalable education equals a infinitely affordable education.

Speaker A 00:01:19

You have to make it break the cost barrier.

Speaker A 00:01:22

And feedback is the number one cost element.

Speaker A 00:01:25

You have to normally pay a teacher or a mentor to give you feedback, but when you're in a community like GitHub, feedback is free.

Speaker A 00:01:33

Feedback is.

Speaker A 00:01:34

In other words, everyone's just in there giving each other feedback.

Speaker A 00:01:37

And so you don't need someone, you pay a lot of money to give you feedback.

Speaker A 00:01:40

In fact, often peer feedback or near peer feedback is more valuable than, you know, big, you know, scary professor feedback because it's your friend, they know they're your buddy or they, or they know how you think or they just went through the same stumbling block and they got over it.

Speaker A 00:01:55

Can explain how they got over it.

Speaker B 00:01:58

Hello, my name is Mark Taylor and welcome to the Education on Far podcast, the place for creative and inspiring learning from around the world.

Speaker B 00:02:12

Listen to teachers, parents and mentors, show how they are supporting children to live their best authentic life and are proving to be a guiding light to us all.

Speaker B 00:02:21

Hello, welcome back.

Speaker B 00:02:22

And I'm delighted to be chatting to Matt Dalio today and he's from Endless Studios.

Speaker B 00:02:26

And their mission is to reignite a love of learning by harnessing the power of game making and digital creations to meet learners wherever they are on their journey.

Speaker B 00:02:34

The games are by far the most powerful way of engaging children in learning.

Speaker B 00:02:38

If you could build a great learning game, you can teach them.

Speaker B 00:02:41

They also realized in their company that the majority of engineers had learned to code by hacking games as kids.

Speaker B 00:02:46

And if there's anything that kids like more than playing games, it's actually building them now through this, they've got three pillars of their work.

Speaker B 00:02:53

They realized they needed to teach kids who live beyond the reach of great teachers.

Speaker B 00:02:56

And they can use games to teach kids everywhere, no matter where they are.

Speaker B 00:03:00

We discussed the barrier of Internet access and how storage is a shockingly powerful tool to deliver this key information.

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And billions of people can't actually afford a computer.

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So we also discuss a payment mechanism that unlocks your device and therefore unlocks financing for the whole world.

Speaker B 00:03:16

This is a great conversation.

Speaker B 00:03:17

I really hope you enjoy where this takes us and the wider conversation of how our world is going to look so much different by engaging kids in a way which we know that they do by loving, creating and playing games.

Speaker B 00:03:30

Hi, Matt, thank you so much for joining us here on the Education on File podcast.

Speaker B 00:03:34

I love the creative idea of what you've put together.

Speaker B 00:03:37

I love the fact that we learn through play, we learn through experimentation and.

Speaker B 00:03:41

And anything which can reach children in every part of the world, I think has to be the way forward.

Speaker B 00:03:47

And I think as you've sort of spoke about before, you know, the thing that happened during COVID and how that sort of exposed Internet, computers, all that sort of stuff is going to be a really important factor here.

Speaker B 00:03:57

So, yeah, thanks so much for being here.

Speaker A 00:03:59

Thank you for having me, Mark.

Speaker B 00:04:01

So for those people who haven't come across Ender Studios before, give us a little bit of a snapshot into.

Speaker B 00:04:07

Into why you created it.

Speaker B 00:04:09

You're passionate about it.

Speaker A 00:04:11

So Endless is really an umbrella group and there are a few pieces inside of it, inside of Endless.

Speaker A 00:04:17

And really our whole goal is around empowerment.

Speaker A 00:04:20

How do you make a world in which every kid is empowered?

Speaker A 00:04:23

And inside of it, Endless Studios really is kind of the epicenter of it.

Speaker A 00:04:27

It's a youth game making studio.

Speaker A 00:04:29

And the goal of this studio is to teach youth at young ages, mostly though high school and college, how to build software.

Speaker A 00:04:36

And what we do is we take the engagement, the mass engagement that you see in video games, and we convert that in the kind of productive energy to turn people into creators in a digital world.

Speaker B 00:04:46

And where did that passion come from?

Speaker B 00:04:49

From.

Speaker B 00:04:50

From.

Speaker B 00:04:50

From your side, you know, where did that sort of.

Speaker B 00:04:52

I mean, I'm a musician and I just kind of knew the first time I was exposed to it, I thought, there's something here which is very different to the rest of my experiences so far.

Speaker A 00:05:01

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A 00:05:02

Well, I mean, to use the metaphor of music, just for a quick second, I'll answer the question more directly.

Speaker A 00:05:08

The way to learn music, there are moments when you need someone to sit down and teach you how to play.

Speaker A 00:05:13

But music, the process of learning music starts with the love of music.

Speaker A 00:05:17

You listen to music and then you pick up an instrument, and then it feels good to strum that guitar or put those hands on that keyboard.

Speaker A 00:05:24

And then you want someone to teach you, and then you want to join a band, and then it really is in the process of playing with the band that you learn.

Speaker A 00:05:31

And so the metaphor of using that same kind of set of experiences, you want something, then someone guides you to teach you the basics of it, and then you go and you do it together.

Speaker A 00:05:43

And it's really passion driving that journey.

Speaker A 00:05:45

That's kind of how we think about learning holistically.

Speaker A 00:05:49

To answer more directly your question, though, the other half, really of what Endless does under this umbrella, is focused on device and Internet access in emerging markets.

Speaker A 00:06:00

Those really are our roots.

Speaker A 00:06:02

And so we were distributing these laptops, which is because that's the tool of work and study, into emerging markets.

Speaker A 00:06:08

And we always had the question, well, once they have the tool, then what do they learn and how do they learn it?

Speaker A 00:06:14

And ultimately the thing we need to teach them is the thing that will get them a job.

Speaker A 00:06:18

And how we need to teach them then became kind of the core question.

Speaker A 00:06:22

If you don't have a teacher, for example, in Guatemala, 70 to 90% of the math teachers cannot pass the math exam that they're supposed to teach to.

Speaker A 00:06:30

So how are they ever going to learn, like digital skills, these incredible skills that power all of Silicon Valley and all the best paying jobs and you know, and really are responsible for so much of the innovation and the economy in the world today?

Speaker A 00:06:42

How do you teach them that if you can't even get them a math teacher to teach them basic math?

Speaker A 00:06:47

And what we discovered was just this kind of like funny coincidence.

Speaker A 00:06:51

And I'll give the kind of coincidence in two stories.

Speaker A 00:06:55

The first was we would walk into those classrooms with our computers there, and there was a little game that we had put on, and it was a math game where numbers fall from the sky and you could shoot the numbers.

Speaker A 00:07:06

And I walked into classroom after classroom of kids shouting delightedly numbers from their multiplication tables.

Speaker A 00:07:16

And they just didn't know they were doing their multiplication tables.

Speaker A 00:07:18

They knew that they were playing a game with and against each other.

Speaker A 00:07:21

And it was so like eye opening for me to be like, whoa, if you want to teach them, why don't we use this thing they really like to teach them, whether a teacher's there or not.

Speaker A 00:07:32

And then the second insight was the same exact insight, but kind of at the other end of the skill curve, we have this amazing team of engineers, Linux engineers.

Speaker A 00:07:40

It's one of the hardest things, you know, the hardest class you could take at Stanford is the operating systems class.

Speaker A 00:07:44

And these are like the gurus of the operating system world.

Speaker A 00:07:47

And I was just so curious, how did you learn to code?

Speaker A 00:07:51

So anytime I would interview one of them, I'd ask them kind of their starting story, and almost always I got the same answer.

Speaker A 00:07:58

It was just this pattern of over and over again them saying, as a kid, I discovered I could hack my games.

Speaker A 00:08:06

And it was more fun to hack my games than to play them.

Speaker A 00:08:10

In other words, I could change the number of lives, or I could get myself, you know, powerful equipment before I went into battle, you know, or I could swap out the audio files with my voice.

Speaker A 00:08:20

And now all of a sudden, the characters had my voice in Galician, because I lived in Galicia.

Speaker A 00:08:25

And like you just, I just heard that story over and over again.

Speaker A 00:08:28

Just yesterday, I was having another conversation with someone who was like, that is how my son as a kid learned, and now he's a software engineer.

Speaker A 00:08:35

In fact, she had two sons who both learned this way.

Speaker A 00:08:38

And it's, it's the way Mark Zuckerberg learned, it's the way Elon Musk learned.

Speaker A 00:08:42

Like, all of their starts were when they were young, and what was it that they wanted to do when they were young?

Speaker A 00:08:49

Microsoft found that four out of five of today's engineers learned when they were young, when they were kids.

Speaker A 00:08:53

What is it the kids want to do?

Speaker A 00:08:55

They want to play games.

Speaker A 00:08:57

And so I was just listening to your wonderful podcast episode before this on basically how to think smart, you know, but by thinking dumb.

Speaker A 00:09:04

And, and I just love the, like, notion of, of kind of flipping things on their head and looking at them differently.

Speaker A 00:09:14

And most people are like, games, we don't like them.

Speaker A 00:09:17

So how do we get kids off of games?

Speaker A 00:09:20

And the question of you flipping it around and being like, well, games, we don't like them playing games.

Speaker A 00:09:25

And we want to teach them these highly employable skills.

Speaker A 00:09:28

Well, what if we could take them from playing games into making games?

Speaker A 00:09:32

What if we could take that same engagement and like a judo, where you use the momentum that, you know, that you're at your enemies, momentum against them to achieve your purposes.

Speaker A 00:09:41

Well, there's this momentum behind games.

Speaker A 00:09:45

The Average kid spends 10,000 hours playing video games by the time they graduate from school.

Speaker A 00:09:50

That's a lot of playing.

Speaker A 00:09:52

But the interesting thing is that the number one trend in video games over the last 15 years is creation Minecraft, a user generated content platform, a creation platform.

Speaker A 00:10:04

They call them UGC platforms.

Speaker A 00:10:06

Roblox, a UGC platform.

Speaker A 00:10:09

Even Fortnite, which is a shooting game, has converged on a UGC platform where you can create your own levels.

Speaker A 00:10:14

And they've taken that and brilliantly made it into a pathway that takes you into a game engine, a real industry standard game engine.

Speaker A 00:10:23

And so the insight was just so simple.

Speaker A 00:10:25

Let's take you from player to creator and in the process you're going to learn how to create software at a knowledge centric, digital centric, AI centric future.

Speaker B 00:10:35

I love it.

Speaker B 00:10:36

And I think that you the, the whole point there of, of actually children like say, wanting to be played games and do it for hours and hours.

Speaker B 00:10:44

I remember my kids doing exactly the same thing and getting really good at it and leaving me for dust on many of the ones when we try and sort of do it as a family.

Speaker B 00:10:52

But it was the sense of, I think what always struck me was that in the classroom or from my sort of education experience, it was kind of they didn't want to fail, they didn't want to ask any questions.

Speaker B 00:11:01

They felt like they should always know what was happening or what was sort of coming up in this project.

Speaker B 00:11:07

And in their creative world, in their game playing world, it was all about failing.

Speaker B 00:11:12

It was all about, oh yeah, I just didn't jump far enough or I didn't quite do this early enough or I need to be faster on this particular control.

Speaker B 00:11:19

But they do that for hours and hours and hours.

Speaker B 00:11:20

It was part of the fun.

Speaker B 00:11:21

It was just.

Speaker B 00:11:22

And you think there's, like you said that there's so much obvious kind of takeaways from that because the children aren't different, it's just the environment that they're in which is different.

Speaker B 00:11:32

And when you can tap into that, then like say the world does become their oyster really.

Speaker A 00:11:37

You're so spot on.

Speaker A 00:11:39

Games, I often say, are just basically giant learning engines, right?

Speaker A 00:11:43

You go in, you can't quite do something, you get better at it, you can.

Speaker A 00:11:47

Then it gives you something more challenging, you can't do it, you get better at it and then you can.

Speaker A 00:11:51

So you get better at whatever the thing is.

Speaker A 00:11:53

Whether that thing is, you know, shooting people in a shooting game or whether that thing is creating in a creating game or whether that thing is understanding history in a game like civilization or understanding, you know, SimCity teaches you how, you know, how not just urban planning works, but also how complex systems work.

Speaker A 00:12:12

But the beauty of all of that is that when you can't quite do it, you're failing.

Speaker A 00:12:18

And in school, when we fail, we feel like failures.

Speaker A 00:12:21

But in games, when you fail, you feel like you're having fun and so you fail.

Speaker A 00:12:25

I was just playing with my nephew, Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, actually Tears of the Kingdom, the most recent one.

Speaker A 00:12:32

And we kept failing at the big boss over and over and over again.

Speaker A 00:12:35

And every time we get a little bit closer, a little bit closer, a little bit closer until we beat the big boss.

Speaker A 00:12:41

And the process of failing is almost more delightful than the process of beating the big boss.

Speaker A 00:12:49

And so when learning feels like games, because a game is a learning engine, but when learning the skills that get us jobs out in the workforce feels like the same delight as playing a game, whether that's Minecraft or creating something in Roblox like that, that's my perspective.

Speaker A 00:13:09

The secret sauce, the Holy grail.

Speaker A 00:13:11

You just gotta make learning fun and kids will do it.

Speaker A 00:13:13

Yeah, and one of the, one of the podcasts you, you recently had, it was talking about how, like, we believe that when kids are young, I have a five year old and a three year old, and play and learning, they're one in the same.

Speaker A 00:13:25

You send a kid to Montessori school and what is their play?

Speaker A 00:13:28

Their play is learning how to pour water into a cup or how to take beans one at a time.

Speaker A 00:13:34

It's the real world made into play and play made into the real world.

Speaker A 00:13:39

And then when we grow up, we sit in textbooks and that's how we're expected to learn and expecting to teach.

Speaker A 00:13:46

But if you can make it as fun as Fortnite or make it as fun as Minecraft, all of a sudden everything changes because now you've got engagement.

Speaker A 00:13:54

And just to give you an idea of the instinct of engagement, not only is it obviously the most popular trend in gaming, but I was just looking last night at the numbers.

Speaker A 00:14:05

We have a game creation tool that scaffolds students from a Minecraft like experience into Unity, the most popular game engine out there.

Speaker A 00:14:12

And literally the goal is to get them into Unity.

Speaker A 00:14:14

And you look at the play, because it's an engine that makes it really easy with one click to go back and forth between playing and making, playing and making.

Speaker A 00:14:22

So you can kind of do it collaboratively.

Speaker A 00:14:25

You could look at the numbers.

Speaker A 00:14:26

How much time do they spend playing and how much time do they spend making?

Speaker A 00:14:30

And the answer is they spend about 10 to 20 times as much time making as they spend playing, because they have more fun making than playing.

Speaker B 00:14:39

It's Amazing, isn't it?

Speaker B 00:14:41

And there are two things that struck me from there.

Speaker B 00:14:43

One is the fact that this academic year, I was offered the chance to teach someone who's the youngest ever.

Speaker B 00:14:49

They're really young in the school.

Speaker B 00:14:52

I think they're like five and a half.

Speaker B 00:14:53

So I've never taught anyone quite that young before.

Speaker B 00:14:56

We're talking about learning how to play the drums.

Speaker B 00:14:59

And the reason most schools wouldn't do that is so partly high coordination, all manner of things in terms of progression.

Speaker B 00:15:09

But they said, look, can you teach this person?

Speaker B 00:15:12

They're really enthusiastic.

Speaker B 00:15:13

They've been talking about it for, like, all their life.

Speaker B 00:15:15

I said, well, let's give it a go.

Speaker B 00:15:16

Let's see what it is.

Speaker B 00:15:17

And the thing that I absolutely love about it is the first thing is to do that.

Speaker B 00:15:21

They skip to the classroom.

Speaker B 00:15:23

And you just think, if you can bottle that in terms of that excitement, they're just full of joy as they do it.

Speaker B 00:15:29

And you suddenly realize that through the eyes of somebody that young, the whole world is just very exciting.

Speaker B 00:15:34

They were excited about the fact that the drumsticks rolled off a drum if they put it in a certain direction.

Speaker B 00:15:40

They were excited about the fact that this metal thing sounded different to this thing with a skin on it.

Speaker B 00:15:45

And this one was smaller and higher than the lower.

Speaker B 00:15:47

And he just thought, actually, there's so much joy and experimentation and learning that was going on in what just seemed like a.

Speaker B 00:15:54

A play session, which essentially it is.

Speaker B 00:15:56

And, you know, and of course, from a lesson standpoint, you adapt what you do for the age of the children and all that.

Speaker B 00:16:01

But it was a real lesson for me in terms of sort of bottling that enthusiasm and just guiding it in a way that kept their enthusiasm.

Speaker B 00:16:09

But at the same time, you know, we were talking about things which were relative to music and interesting in what they do.

Speaker B 00:16:15

And I thought, if you can keep that going, like you say, as you start to them to get older and certainly into the teenage years, then I think that then becomes the world will look very different generally for them, and also how they can then take that forward into adult life, because I think that's essentially who we are all the time.

Speaker B 00:16:32

And like you say, the world takes it out of us, rather than our natural state taking it out of us, because that's what everyone tells us is the truth and the way the world works.

Speaker A 00:16:42

Yeah.

Speaker A 00:16:43

Yeah.

Speaker A 00:16:43

They call it to play the drums for a reason, to play the guitar for a reason.

Speaker A 00:16:50

And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I often use the Metaphor of Guitar Hero, which is this, you know, you basically kind of, you have a fake guitar and you tap the little buttons and with these numbers coming at you on the screen and then you can play guitar, quote, unquote.

Speaker A 00:17:08

Play guitar.

Speaker A 00:17:09

It's a video game.

Speaker A 00:17:10

I should look up the numbers.

Speaker A 00:17:12

But millions and millions of people have played it and I always look at that and it's like, what an opportunity to take that passion for the toy version and to turn it into the real version.

Speaker A 00:17:27

In other words, if you could make an experience.

Speaker A 00:17:29

And this is kind of the metaphor of what we're doing, but in the space of music, millions of people who could have become real guitarists who never had the opportunity to, because there wasn't a pathway to, to go from I'm really good at this toy guitar to now, it turns out the next step on a very smooth journey is to pick up something that feels a little more like a real guitar.

Speaker A 00:17:51

Until one day you're shredding on a real guitar and we're trying to do.

Speaker A 00:17:55

Maybe I take the metaphor too far, but to do the exact same thing in ultimately learning the skills that get you a job through games.

Speaker B 00:18:03

And I think for a music point of view there's, there is a crossover there because there is that kind of coordination.

Speaker B 00:18:10

There's the, the cognitive skills that you're learning when you're playing those things.

Speaker B 00:18:14

And I think if you can transition it smoothly into that sense of them.

Speaker B 00:18:19

Also understanding the fact if you're able to play this game, like you said, for 10 hours in order to get to this level, even when you're then in a, in a kind of a physical situation when you're learning a musical instrument and the resilience you need and the practice you need for that, because it's kind of right now you need to practice, that's half an hour on your own in a different room doing your thing, they think, oh, that seems like a lot of hard work.

Speaker B 00:18:41

And I'm not sure how quickly I'm getting anywhere as opposed to we're going to do 10 hours, but it's going to look slightly different.

Speaker B 00:18:47

You know, you've got that skill set because you've done it on this game.

Speaker B 00:18:50

Let's see what we can try and achieve in these smaller bite size things.

Speaker B 00:18:54

And like I say, I think the technology then would help because of course a lot of the time if you're practicing at home alone, then you might be doing it on your own, you might have a parent that can help you, but it's a little Bit more schooled, as it were.

Speaker B 00:19:05

And like I say, if that's the thing which is turning people off, if you can kind of gamify it in some way or, or do in a different way.

Speaker B 00:19:11

But I always say that, you know, one of the reasons that they do maths every day in school is because they want that continual progression and that continual thing to do.

Speaker B 00:19:20

I often go in and it's like half an hour a week.

Speaker B 00:19:22

And if they don't do any practice or any work in between that time and the time a week from now, then it's going to feel a little bit stifled.

Speaker B 00:19:30

And so I think what you said there is brilliant.

Speaker B 00:19:31

If they can, if we can find any way just to kind of just try this and do it in this way, because it's going to help, rather than just having to sit down and combining that with the understanding that you're already doing this, this amazing skill of resilience and over, over and over, practicing something and failing all the time.

Speaker B 00:19:47

But it's exactly the same thing.

Speaker B 00:19:49

Just looking at it in a different way, then, yeah, that could be a really interesting thing to develop.

Speaker A 00:19:55

You know, when I was in, in high school, I was just starting to learn guitar, and I remember the first time, and really, I think actually might be the only time that I went into a jam with friends.

Speaker A 00:20:07

And that feeling of playing rather than sitting on my own and playing, playing with a bunch of other people and just feeling like you're part of something bigger than yourself and my instrument contributed to this larger group.

Speaker A 00:20:21

Like, I literally, I was thinking about that a couple of months ago.

Speaker A 00:20:24

Like, to this day, you know, decades later, it's still in me.

Speaker A 00:20:29

And I feel like that's the second giant piece of what we have to unlock for youth, is that they have to go from doing what they're doing alone to doing it in a community to doing it with others, because it's just so much more delightful.

Speaker A 00:20:45

The other thing about it is that you learn from each other.

Speaker A 00:20:48

I remember I was very, very much the novice, which is why I didn't go back, you know, but I, I remember the patience with which they taught me.

Speaker A 00:21:00

And in a, in a community, people teach you this notion of implicit mentorship, especially when you're working on larger projects.

Speaker A 00:21:09

You know, we really look at GitHub as inspiration.

Speaker A 00:21:12

In other words, there are half a billion projects inside of GitHub with 100 million people working on them.

Speaker A 00:21:19

GitHub is basically the tool, the platform where basically all software is built.

Speaker A 00:21:24

And if you can build, quite literally inside of it, then students are learning GitHub like the actual professional tools, but they also, when you build inside of it and you apply those practices, you also then have again that implicit mentorship where if you're working on a project and someone needs you to contribute your piece to that project, they're going to give you feedback, the F and fire feedback.

Speaker A 00:21:52

They're going to give you feedback that's going to allow you to get better.

Speaker A 00:21:57

They're not giving it to you to get, to make you better.

Speaker A 00:21:59

They're giving it to you because they need you to deliver something that works.

Speaker A 00:22:03

But in the process, just like in the workforce of getting that feedback, you get better.

Speaker B 00:22:07

Yeah, I love that.

Speaker B 00:22:09

And one of the best bits of advice I was given when I first started playing for my teacher was go and play.

Speaker B 00:22:15

Go find anywhere to play.

Speaker B 00:22:17

I did.

Speaker B 00:22:17

I joined the local band, the local music centers, and then I was just playing all the time and luckily had sort of supportive people around me to help me do that.

Speaker B 00:22:26

But then the other thing, and this is sort of what I was going to tie into what you just said, is that the fact, it all became very relevant because the stuff that I was practicing and the stuff that I was learning, I was like, oh, I see.

Speaker B 00:22:36

Because this enables me to keep time, this enables me to play this rhythm and like say I need to play this rhythm, this well, because the person sat next to me is doing it as well and the, you know, the violins are doing it too.

Speaker B 00:22:46

So if we're all doing it differently, how's that going to work and going to fit together?

Speaker B 00:22:49

And like you say you, then you're doing something together, you're being creative, you're working together.

Speaker B 00:22:54

Your, your, your skill set is then just expanding for, but for real purpose.

Speaker B 00:22:58

And then you add on top of that, oh, now we're going to do a performance and you know, it just spirals in a really positive way and it all has purpose.

Speaker B 00:23:05

And then why would you not practice that?

Speaker B 00:23:08

Well, that was always my thing because I just want to make sure that I can show up and do what it is that I love doing.

Speaker B 00:23:12

I mean, it's a bit of a no brainer at that point.

Speaker A 00:23:15

Yes.

Speaker A 00:23:16

Like as soon as you want to do something because you have to do it to be part of a group and do your part well, all of a sudden, as you say, yeah, I'm ready to play my scales.

Speaker A 00:23:25

If making you playing my scales makes me better so that I can play in that group, sign me up.

Speaker B 00:23:29

Yeah.

Speaker A 00:23:30

And I would say that the Number one gap that stopped my learning journey of the guitar really, was that I didn't have an opportunity to go back to a group.

Speaker A 00:23:41

I was invited once and, you know, and I don't know, I wasn't very good, you know, and if I'd had an easy community, an easy journey to enter a place where I could play like that, to this day, I would probably be a very different guitarist.

Speaker A 00:23:56

And what we're trying to do is to make that so seamless so you just kind of almost slip in without even realizing it.

Speaker A 00:24:03

But again, in the context of learning the skills that get you a job in a world of AI, yeah.

Speaker B 00:24:08

So take us into that from a sort of a practical standpoint.

Speaker B 00:24:10

So those people who haven't got experience of what it looks like to be part of a platform to learn in this way, or for someone who's saying, oh yeah, I think my child would actually like to learn something in exactly the same way that we've done.

Speaker B 00:24:24

How does that look from a progression standpoint?

Speaker B 00:24:25

They go to the website, they log in.

Speaker B 00:24:27

How do they sort of access the things that they're doing?

Speaker A 00:24:31

So the easiest way to do it today is we have a tool called nStar.

Speaker A 00:24:36

Go download it, play around in it, make inside of it, see what other people are making inside of it.

Speaker A 00:24:42

That's the most concrete answer to that question.

Speaker A 00:24:46

The less concrete answer is that today we actually do not have an open to the world experience for the community.

Speaker A 00:24:52

We've been running programs for governments.

Speaker A 00:24:54

I live in Abu Dhabi.

Speaker A 00:24:55

The government has opened a very exciting contract here to pilot doing a national rollout.

Speaker A 00:25:00

We're also working with a bunch of other countries in Jordan and in Peru and in a whole bunch of Africa and India.

Speaker A 00:25:08

And so we're doing kind of more targeted projects on the pathway to making something that is open to the whole world joint.

Speaker A 00:25:17

So when we open to the whole world, everything really will be in place and have run for quite a few years.

Speaker A 00:25:24

With that said, I'll describe what we are aspiring to build and I'll describe what I want.

Speaker A 00:25:29

Someone could start with today.

Speaker A 00:25:30

The pathway is really simple.

Speaker A 00:25:32

You take a tool like the one I just described.

Speaker A 00:25:35

It's called NStar.

Speaker A 00:25:36

Go play it.

Speaker A 00:25:36

And that kind of almost becomes your taste.

Speaker A 00:25:39

It becomes the sweetness, the excitement.

Speaker A 00:25:41

It's like that, you know, the pretend guitar in play experience.

Speaker A 00:25:46

And then once youth are excited, then we have a scaffolded, you know, more deliberate experience.

Speaker A 00:25:52

Once they want to be taught for a little bit of time, we teach them for a little bit of time.

Speaker A 00:25:57

Our goal is to make that as short a period as possible because our real goal is to get them into a community where they make together.

Speaker A 00:26:03

The real core of what we're building is a community where people come together to make games and that can be their own games that they make with their friends, that can be games that other community members are making that they can come and add to.

Speaker A 00:26:17

We also are building, working with professional game studios that build games in a way that allows students to come and contribute to and participate in.

Speaker A 00:26:25

So our eventual aspiration is that there's a whole ecosystem of really great games built by really top notch studios.

Speaker A 00:26:32

All of the players who can then be invited into the creation process, it becomes kind of this whole flywheel, this whole cycle.

Speaker A 00:26:40

So and that that journey can literally go on for years because to learn the skills that will get you job, that, that takes, that takes years.

Speaker A 00:26:50

And so you have to make the engagement be able to last for years.

Speaker A 00:26:54

And that's where this notion of basically make game making look like GitHub and literally take place eventually in GitHub when you're skilled up to be able to participate in something as scary and intimidating as GitHub, if we can scaffold you really systematically and really tutorialize you just like a game tutorializes you into very, in some cases very complex mechanics that if we can like slowly guide you into that, then once you're in there you can build and do and learn for years.

Speaker B 00:27:25

Amazing.

Speaker B 00:27:26

And take me also into the, into the Internet side of things and the computer side of things and the funding of that as well.

Speaker B 00:27:34

I'm sort of curious of is the sort of, from a technical point of view, you sort of said that the ability to have the storage in and they'd be able to just have the Internet at a certain point that gives you access to what you need to learn.

Speaker B 00:27:45

Because for many people, myself included, the Internet's over here somewhere and I plug in or I click the WI fi and away we go.

Speaker B 00:27:53

So take us into that because it's sort of a fascinating concept which I think will hopefully inspire people who think I'm always struggling with this particular issue.

Speaker A 00:28:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A 00:28:03

So the first is that we have this concept of kind of Maslow's hierarchy of educational needs.

Speaker A 00:28:08

You have to have electricity to get a computer, to have the Internet, to have the skills to have an income, to be self actualized.

Speaker A 00:28:17

Every layer of that stack has to be solved.

Speaker A 00:28:20

The laptops and Internet layer of that are not solved.

Speaker A 00:28:25

Internet is much more distributed.

Speaker A 00:28:27

So I'll double click into the laptop stuff, if you're interested.

Speaker A 00:28:31

But on the Internet side, there's just so much cool stuff that can be done, and frankly that we've done.

Speaker A 00:28:36

But the basics of it boil down to this very funny bumper sticker that I once read, that the cloud is just other people's computers.

Speaker A 00:28:45

In other words, the cloud we think of as this fuzzy thing, but the Internet is really actually hard drives somewhere else with wires that were dug by trenches with shovels, with a tower nearby us.

Speaker A 00:28:58

And then that last little bit goes to our device.

Speaker A 00:29:00

And if that last little bit is cut, then you have nothing.

Speaker A 00:29:04

So to use the metaphor of a reservoir with a pipe, you have a giant reservoir of information like water.

Speaker A 00:29:11

And if the pipe is cut, you have nothing.

Speaker A 00:29:14

In emerging markets, they have the problem that the pipe gets cut a lot.

Speaker A 00:29:18

And so what they have is above all of these houses, like if you go to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, you'll see these little blue and black canisters, big water tanks, 50100 gallon tanks on top of everyone's house.

Speaker A 00:29:29

And the reason is because when the water cuts or the electricity cuts, no problem, they can still take a shower, they can still get their water.

Speaker A 00:29:36

They can.

Speaker A 00:29:36

They still have access to the thing they need.

Speaker A 00:29:39

The big difference between there are two big differences between water and data.

Speaker A 00:29:44

The first is that storage is basically near infinite in the realm of data.

Speaker A 00:29:51

So to give you an idea, a $100 hard drive of a couple of terabytes can fit millions, millions of web pages inside of it.

Speaker A 00:30:00

The largest hard drive that you can get today is, I think like 44 terabytes.

Speaker A 00:30:05

The entire hugging face.

Speaker A 00:30:08

One of the AI websites has this repository of Facebook, the entire Internet condensed down for training of 44 terabytes.

Speaker A 00:30:17

So it's kind of like the Internet compresses into 44 terabytes.

Speaker A 00:30:19

It's a little bit of an oversimplification, but the point is that you have way more than you need on your little hard drive.

Speaker A 00:30:27

And you can refresh it whenever you connect to the Internet so that it's always full of fresh content.

Speaker A 00:30:32

The other interesting thing about data, as opposed to water, is that it propagates.

Speaker A 00:30:37

You can copy it infinitely.

Speaker A 00:30:39

And so if I'm at a school and my phone can download content, because the school has Internet, my home doesn't, I can then take that home and then it can automatically upload to my computer, which will have a hard drive that's larger and fits more.

Speaker A 00:30:55

And by the way, to use the visualization of the favela in Rio, which literally has, I think, 400.

Speaker A 00:31:00

There's a 1:1 favela in Rio with 400,000 and a hillside all clustered on top of each other.

Speaker A 00:31:06

You can imagine a world in which data can pass from one device to the next, to the next, to the next, like a fire, a wildfire.

Speaker A 00:31:13

So one person gets access to the day's news, and then it updates to the person next to them and the person next to them, and all of a sudden the entire hillside full of 400,000 people has access to this content.

Speaker A 00:31:26

So when you think of data like water and as something that can move around across the hard drives and storage that people have with them, then what you end up with is something that is usable regardless of whether they have a traditional, always on, always fast, always cheap Internet connection, which in most of emerging markets is actually not the case.

Speaker B 00:31:49

Well, I think that's inspirational because for anybody listening around the world, that sense of you can get access to access to what you need no matter what your circumstances are, let's just find a way of doing it.

Speaker B 00:32:00

There's.

Speaker B 00:32:01

There's something I always remember from Al Kingsley, when he was a guest on the show.

Speaker B 00:32:05

He said, we often think about these things the wrong way around.

Speaker A 00:32:08

It's.

Speaker B 00:32:08

It's kind of, I want to.

Speaker B 00:32:10

I want 10 new computers, and we don't have the budget, so therefore we're not going to have it.

Speaker B 00:32:15

I'm sort of oversimplifying it as opposed to, okay, so we need this amount of money to buy 10 computers.

Speaker B 00:32:23

How are we going to go about doing that so that we can create the environment and the skill set that we want to be able to do it, and then it becomes a journey and a collaborative experience, and you can then have whatever you like.

Speaker B 00:32:33

It's just a question of how you decide to go about creating that.

Speaker B 00:32:36

And so what you just said, you know, from someone listening around the world, where they're thinking, oh, but we'd love to be able to do this, but we don't have that Internet access or we don't have the opportunity to do this, we know we keep getting sort of caught out in this way, knowing that actually there is a way we can find out we can do it in a different way, and let's use that as the skill set and the problem solving.

Speaker B 00:32:55

It's then going to help us sort of, let's say, get that community together so that we can all learn together and move forward completely.

Speaker A 00:33:02

The oversimplification of how you, how you get these programs to people is you just dump the content.

Speaker A 00:33:07

All the learning stuff that I just described in the computer, whether they have Internet or not, it's there.

Speaker B 00:33:12

Yeah.

Speaker A 00:33:12

And the interesting thing about the Internet, one important misconception is that the Internet's all about communication.

Speaker A 00:33:17

Some of it's communication, but communication is actually really cheap.

Speaker A 00:33:20

Like a tweet is like three kilobytes.

Speaker A 00:33:22

You can send literally millions of tweets on a monthly data plan.

Speaker A 00:33:27

It's the information, it's the heavier stuff.

Speaker A 00:33:30

And that storage is really good at.

Speaker A 00:33:33

You also mentioned the hard drive or, sorry, the cost of the hardware, which is so spot on.

Speaker A 00:33:38

If you're like a ministry of education, you're like, I want to get 3 million kids computers.

Speaker A 00:33:43

Well, $300 a computer, it's about a billion dollars.

Speaker A 00:33:45

And if you're a school district, if you're a school system in an emerging market system in emerging markets, a billion dollars is a lot of money that just literally does not exist to be able to buy everyone that.

Speaker A 00:33:55

The way we think about that is that people, the consumers want these devices.

Speaker A 00:34:00

When you ask, do you want a computer?

Speaker A 00:34:02

They know that a computer equals education.

Speaker A 00:34:05

So they want it.

Speaker A 00:34:06

They just can't afford the upfront cash payment for it.

Speaker A 00:34:10

But if you're able to finance it and now make the little monthly payments cheap enough for them to be able to afford on a monthly basis, now all of a sudden, a couple billion more people can afford computers.

Speaker A 00:34:22

And there's an organization, a company in Africa that was trying to sell, was selling very effectively little solar lanterns.

Speaker A 00:34:29

But then they started selling kind of bigger home solar systems.

Speaker A 00:34:34

And those home solar systems were more expensive than people had the cash to pay.

Speaker A 00:34:38

And like computers, the banks wouldn't lend money to people in this demographic because they were considered not credit worthy.

Speaker A 00:34:46

And so what the solar company did was they started something called pay as you go, pay go.

Speaker A 00:34:50

And it's very simple idea.

Speaker A 00:34:52

When you pay, it unlocks.

Speaker A 00:34:54

If you don't pay, it locks.

Speaker A 00:34:56

Well, people want their light each day, so they keep paying.

Speaker A 00:35:00

Now all of a sudden, financing is available to millions more people.

Speaker A 00:35:03

In fact, this company celebrated 200 million people having access to light this past summer.

Speaker A 00:35:09

You apply that exact same thing to computers, which literally we are doing with that company.

Speaker A 00:35:14

And now all of a sudden you have access to, you know, to financing.

Speaker A 00:35:18

As someone who previously couldn't have gotten financing to buy this computer that can be your child's education.

Speaker B 00:35:25

And I think sort of to round up this concept, I love the idea that you sort of talk about sort of youth really, they're going to shape the tech of the future, but also they're going to take, they're going to shape our world because it's going to take us into whatever that future looks like.

Speaker B 00:35:39

And we know this is, this is changing a lot.

Speaker B 00:35:41

So it makes perfect sense that we empower young people to be able to feel that they can do this in a collaborative way, in a really supportive way, in an exciting way.

Speaker B 00:35:51

And the possibilities are endless in a positive standpoint because we know currently, you know, everything's quite a negative outlook on anything that's going to be happening.

Speaker B 00:36:00

And I think to give that empowerment to young people to say, look, this is your world, you're going to take it forward.

Speaker B 00:36:06

And actually giving them the access to be able to take that, that is, is a really sort of integral part of, of I know what you, what you believe and what you're trying to do.

Speaker B 00:36:15

And I can then sort of see that purpose and that sort of greater goal, as it were.

Speaker A 00:36:20

When we started on this mission, it was really, you know, how do you lift up the individual humans?

Speaker A 00:36:25

Because at an individual level, if you lift, teach someone these skills, you change their life.

Speaker A 00:36:31

And then the world started becoming a little bit darker and a little bit scarier.

Speaker A 00:36:35

And then AI came and there was this kind of realization that if you take, there are 3 billion youth under the age of 25 years old, and if you take that 3 billion youth and you say they grow up into the future, there's a wonderful quote that says that youth are 25% of our population, but 100% of our future.

Speaker A 00:36:53

When they become our future, if they have the skills, imagine hypothetical thought experiment with two potential worlds, one where they, they have the skills to be like uber enabled in this digital economy, totally fluent.

Speaker A 00:37:08

Imagine all of them are like, you know what, what young Mark Zuckerberg's young Elon Musk could do.

Speaker A 00:37:14

Whoa.

Speaker A 00:37:14

The future they will build, well, the gosh, the problems they will solve.

Speaker A 00:37:18

In other words, you know, I often say that if you could solve one problem from my perspective, it would be to teach youth how to solve all the other problems in the other world.

Speaker A 00:37:29

AI comes, destroys half of jobs, which some people are claiming is about to happen.

Speaker A 00:37:35

And now all of a sudden those youth are not trained to thrive in a world of AI and a world of software and AI has just taken all their jobs and you have mass unemployment and you have mass hunger and mass anger and mass literally, that is revolution in war territory.

Speaker A 00:37:50

And so I believe that the difference between those Two futures, one where everyone has the skills, at least the majority of people have the skills, or one most people do not have the skills, I believe is two different versions of humanity ahead of us.

Speaker A 00:38:04

And just to use kind of a quick historical example, when the printing press was invented, interestingly, it was born two years.

Speaker A 00:38:14

Leonardo da Vinci was born within two years of the printing press.

Speaker A 00:38:17

And then the Renaissance happened a few decades later.

Speaker A 00:38:20

And what Leonardo da Vinci did could not have happened without the printing press.

Speaker A 00:38:24

If you go and actually see and dissect, what did he do?

Speaker A 00:38:27

And where did the source information come from?

Speaker A 00:38:29

Couldn't have happened without the printing press.

Speaker A 00:38:31

But the reality and the printing press changed, you know, by the way, all of a sudden.

Speaker A 00:38:36

Politics and religion and all the kind of social structures.

Speaker A 00:38:38

But the reality was most people for hundreds of years lived the same life on farms, totally unaffected by the printing press.

Speaker A 00:38:48

And if you look at literacy rates, literacy rates did not change for hundreds of years either.

Speaker A 00:38:54

Almost flatline, barely grew.

Speaker A 00:38:56

There was one country that, in order to rule its empire, needed to teach literacy, among other things, and that was the UK.

Speaker A 00:39:06

And it was when they hit, when the UK hit 65% literacy, that you saw the Industrial Revolution happen.

Speaker A 00:39:13

And the Industrial Revolution was thousands of little micro inventions.

Speaker A 00:39:17

You needed postmasters and rail masters and managers of factories and accountants, and you needed an entire society, society to be functioning within the.

Speaker A 00:39:28

The enablement of literacy in order to have an Industrial Revolution.

Speaker A 00:39:32

And it was the Industrial Revolution that changed everything about the way that everyone lives.

Speaker A 00:39:38

Everything.

Speaker A 00:39:39

And so it wasn't actually the printing press that changed the world.

Speaker A 00:39:43

It was the printing press plus mass literacy of that tool.

Speaker A 00:39:49

And we talk about this, this computer and AI as the printing press of our era.

Speaker A 00:39:54

If it's the printing press of our era, we must teach mass literacy of that tool as well.

Speaker A 00:40:01

Because from my perspective, teaching kids how to use Instagram is not mass literacy.

Speaker A 00:40:06

Teaching them how to create with this tool, that's literacy.

Speaker B 00:40:10

And then we go back to the question we ask here so much, which is, what is school all about?

Speaker B 00:40:17

What is it trying to do?

Speaker B 00:40:19

It sort of set within its own world, because this is what we've always done, and we can't quite think about how we can just revolutionize it in such a way, because we can't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Speaker B 00:40:29

But that's going to happen either way.

Speaker B 00:40:31

So how we go about it and how we're going to do it and why I love these conversations is because when we can have these conversations that sort of just explain so succinctly, this is what's happening, this is why it's happening, and this is how if you can't take control of what's happening in everybody's classroom, maybe you can take control of a thought process or guide them into an organization or somebody that's creating something that's making a difference in whatever part of the world.

Speaker B 00:40:54

So that's such an important thing.

Speaker B 00:40:56

And you mentioned before about feedback being so important and quite rightly, the acronym of fire, Feedback, inspiration, resilience and empowerment is something which is integral really to, I think, everything that we talk about.

Speaker B 00:41:09

Is there anything else that sort of strikes you when you hear that and maybe like, say linked to some of that sort of journey that you're on?

Speaker A 00:41:17

I personally love starting with the I inspiration.

Speaker A 00:41:22

When someone is inspired, it leads to all the other stuff it leads to.

Speaker A 00:41:26

It leads to the resilience.

Speaker A 00:41:28

When someone is passionate about something, they then want to go through whatever it takes that is hard in order for them to get good at what they have to get good at.

Speaker A 00:41:36

So inspiration equals resilience.

Speaker A 00:41:39

From my perspective, the community aspect of taking someone individually.

Speaker A 00:41:44

In other words, they're all, you know, sitting on their bed playing guitar alone, doing scales to.

Speaker A 00:41:49

I'm now in, in a band with some friends and I'm learning from them and I'm making music I could never make on my own because someone else has got a different instrument than I've got.

Speaker A 00:41:57

You know, literally and metaphorically like that.

Speaker A 00:42:00

That and feedback for me are so intertwined.

Speaker A 00:42:03

Being part of a community and feedback are one and the same.

Speaker A 00:42:07

By the way, as we look at educating en masse, you have to make infinitely scalable education equals infinitely affordable education.

Speaker A 00:42:14

You have to make it break the cost barrier.

Speaker A 00:42:17

And feedback is the number one cost element.

Speaker A 00:42:20

You have to normally pay a teacher or a mentor to give you feedback.

Speaker A 00:42:25

But when you're in a community like GitHub, feedback is free.

Speaker A 00:42:29

Feedback is, in other words, everyone's just in there giving each other feedback.

Speaker A 00:42:33

And so you don't need someone, you pay a lot of money to give you feedback.

Speaker A 00:42:36

In fact, often peer feedback or near peer feedback is more valuable than, you know, big, you know, scary professor feedback because it's your friend, they know your buddy, or they, or they know how you think, or they just went through the same stumbling block and they got over it.

Speaker A 00:42:51

Can explain how they got over it.

Speaker A 00:42:53

So community and feedback are so intertwined.

Speaker A 00:42:56

They're also so core to the core concept that you must break the cost of education.

Speaker A 00:43:02

Because if everyone has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a fancy college degree in order to get a job in this world.

Speaker A 00:43:09

We won't have that.

Speaker A 00:43:10

And we now have people who.

Speaker A 00:43:13

More people in America don't want to get a college degree than do want to get a college degree for the first time basically ever.

Speaker A 00:43:19

And the reason is basically math.

Speaker A 00:43:21

It's economics.

Speaker A 00:43:22

If they can't afford the cost of the education and they can't necessarily get a job that pays for that expensive thing, they're scared of it.

Speaker A 00:43:29

They don't want it.

Speaker A 00:43:30

Feedback, I believe is in a community is how you break the cost barrier for an alternative path that can.

Speaker A 00:43:37

Ultimately, we're working with colleges to help actually enable the colleges to give you this experience.

Speaker A 00:43:42

And we're also working outside of that to say, how do you get the skills even if you can't afford it, even if you're a kid in Nigeria?

Speaker A 00:43:50

And then in terms of empowerment, literally our vision statement, it's been our vision statement from the very beginning.

Speaker A 00:43:57

Was the whole world empowered.

Speaker A 00:44:00

Those first three FI and R are really all about building a world in which, you know, there is mass empowerment.

Speaker B 00:44:09

I love that.

Speaker B 00:44:09

And I think one thing I'd just like to say just as we wrap, is the, I think the peer aspect is really, really key because like you say, I can learn from people at the same level as me, but also like, say the people that are slightly, I did this last week so I can show you it this week and then the next person, oh, I did this last year and I can show you all how to do this and then you can work together on it.

Speaker B 00:44:29

So rather than, like I say it, being teacher, professor, student is kind of.

Speaker B 00:44:33

There's a whole age range, there's a whole experience level.

Speaker B 00:44:36

There's a whole thing that I actually learned this in this way because actually today this works for me as opposed to this was what worked when I was taught it 10 years ago or 20 years ago or whatever.

Speaker B 00:44:46

And I think that suddenly becomes a very exciting world of education as well.

Speaker B 00:44:49

And how, how that can work, like, say, outside of the classroom, but also how it could, you know, schools could be, could be remodeled in, in that way and just sort of using everyone as a collective hub for learning.

Speaker B 00:45:00

And that's probably a whole different podcast, but I just really, I really appreciate your conversation and really appreciate everything that you've.

Speaker B 00:45:08

You shared today and tell everyone where they can go to find out more.

Speaker B 00:45:12

All things endless.

Speaker A 00:45:14

If you want to learn about all things endless, go to endless global.com.

Speaker A 00:45:17

that's the really the umbrella brand website and so that'll point you to all the different things across the endless world.

Speaker A 00:45:22

If you want to double click and understand the game studio, get it, go to Endless Global.

Speaker B 00:45:28

Amazing.

Speaker B 00:45:28

Thank you so much indeed.

Speaker B 00:45:29

Keep up the great work.

Speaker B 00:45:31

These are the conversations that kind of fill me with joy every day that we get a chance to share.

Speaker B 00:45:35

So yeah, I really appreciate the time and yeah, look forward to seeing where it takes you in the future.

Speaker A 00:45:40

Thank you for the time.

Speaker B 00:45:42

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.