Jonathan Blow has a new talk that seems very relev...
# thinking-togetherRay Imber
07/22/2020, 5:16 PMI particularly like his phrase: "systems literacy"
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Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 5:22 PM
I work in educational games, and this talk resonated a lot with me and my coworkers. It echoes a lot of things we've arrived at over the years. We're big on the idea of "design the gameplay first, then figure out what you can use that gameplay to teach" as opposed to the reverse. We also have a huge focus on systems-thinking, since we specialize in teaching troubleshooting skills. We also also strive to impart the "spirit of engineering", in addition to familiarity with particular technical matter.
One problem that we continually run into is that our biggest clients expect their educational software to fit a very specific, very familiar format. They buy educational software primarily for compliance reasons, not with an interest in helping people learn and do better at their jobs. (Worth noting: these clients are multinational companies, mostly focussed on resources, manufacturing, or transportation — business not known for being progressive.) They want multiple choice quizzes. They want slideshows. When we build things that learners genuinely enjoy using, we often have trouble getting higher-ups to deploy them across their org.
So I bristle at Blow's contention that there aren't people out there trying to make these sorts of games. There are! It's just not a guarantee that if we build it, they (customers) will come.
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Chris G
07/22/2020, 5:27 PMI work at one of those multinational corps interested only in slideshows and multiple choice quizzes for compliance sake, and "education" is probably the most pointless hours I spend all year (and that is, painfully, really saying something, compared to other useless tasks I trudge through)
I would have no idea how to break through this wall of set expectations, other than to produce something too good to ignore / that resets the marketplace.
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Ray Imber
07/22/2020, 5:29 PMThat's a completely fair criticism! Especially in this community, people are obviously working on these problems.
In Blow's defense, he doesn't blame it all on the creators. He explicitly states how this kind of paradigm will never be bought by the current education establishment. It's the section where he compares the current education system to Cable packages from the 80's.
His suggestion is to ignore that market and go to Steam or the more general game markets instead. It's not a great solution honestly... You have to pay the bills, and Steam just can't compare to these big corporate contracts. The incentive structure is working against you hard here! It's a hard problem for sure.
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Orion Reed
07/22/2020, 5:29 PMI got into all of this via video games and am a big fan of Jonathan’s principled approach to his work. I personally believe there’s immense value in embedding expressive systems within a more ‘traditional’ game. For example, Minecraft taught many the basics of circuitry, Boolean logic, and even composability, modularity and systems design!
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Will
07/22/2020, 5:53 PM@Ivan Reese for some reason, I’ve never actually seen what you work on. That’s so cool! I’m really curious what workflows you have for building the interactive animations. I noticed it’s all SVG. What’s the path from designer -> engineer look like?
(As an aside, I was watching the video and made it to “Explanations made simple powered by…” and my mind sadly autofilled with “AI”, and I was very happy when I got “interactive animations”.)
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Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 6:10 PM
@Ray Imber "Ignore that market" — Totally, and that's basically what we've done. The website I linked is something we built to run around the establishment and break down the back door.
(You probably know this, but I'll say it for the benefit of anyone reading who doesn't know...) Most companies have a Learning Management System (LMS) and expect to be able to buy modular slideshow+quiz content to plug into it, and then they assign that content to their employees whenever the mandated compliance schedule or some special circumstances (eg: a lawsuit) requires them to do so. To play in this market, you need to be B2B and by the book.
Our strategy for LunchBox Sessions is to force companies out of that mold. It's an iPhone-esq walled garden, that is meant to be discovered first by the employees who will be taking the training, who then tell their managers "This is really good, please buy this for us". Those managers then say to us, "Put your stuff in our corporate LMS", and we say "We can't". Occasionally, the company will relent and buy our material on our terms. The employees using the software love it, and we've won a customer for life. Often though, the company says "too bad" to their employees, and so we just have to wait for them to come around.
This "grassroots" / word-of-mouth approach to sales led to a lot of really interesting design choices at pretty much every level, all the way down to how we plan gameplay and educational objectives and such. Too much to go into here, but (tying back to the original post) there are definitely ways to improve the educational software market — they just, as Blow advocates, have to come mostly from outside the current practice.
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Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 6:51 PM
@Will The cutesy answer is that the path from designer -> engineer is not travelled by our content, but rather by our content creators. ;)
I'm the only formal programmer at our company, and I don't do any of the work on our content — I just build tools (and... all our web services, from visual design to database optimization, /curtsy/). When we hire a content creator, we hire only for art skills, and then train them how to program well enough to add logic and interactivity to their artwork — basic procedural code: variables, conditionals, calling functions, but not necessarily even arrays or maps. That training process takes about six months (most of it focused on domain-specific stuff), but they're usually able to build simple simulations pretty much immediately. We typically have 3-6 artists on the team. We'd happily train them much further in programming, but none of them have wanted to learn that yet (can't blame them.. which is why we're all here, right?)
Our current pipeline is:
1. Draw in Adobe Animate (nee Flash) or Illustrator, with names given to various objects in the drawing.
2. Export to SVG (which forces us to only use a safe subset of drawing features, sadly)
3. Run a simple CLI tool to scaffold an interactive simulation atop our in-house framework (titled SVGA)
4. Write some high-level CoffeeScript code to express the simulation logic, add controls, etc.
5. Run a CLI command to deploy to our site. The final result is a single HTML file that works in any modern browser. Typical build size is about 200 KB, including the framework.
It takes one of our artists about a week to build something like this from scratch, with a fairly even split of time between planning, research, design, art, and coding. According to
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Chris Knott
07/22/2020, 6:57 PMThis is getting off topic but couldn't you pitch it like a tool on your site where they learn the material, then a module on their LMS where they are tested/audited?
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Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 7:02 PM
@Chris Knott Yeah — sorry for monopolizing the thread. /tugs collar/
Some of our clients choose to do that as a compromise — they fill their LMS with empty content objects that just link to our site, and then we send them "score" data via an API. It sucks, because our idea of testing doesn't fit that mold. We're trying to get away from the notion of a "score" entirely.
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Kartik Agaram
07/24/2020, 11:05 PM
I'm still watching this. Halfway through, this feels complementary to and as important as Bret Victor's work.
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