Make To Learn

PRINCIPLE: Creation Is The Deepest Form of Learning

Then we realized that if students could build a game, they would learn more by building a game than by playing games. The act of building a game is the act of building a real piece of software. If we teach them to build games, we teach them the very skills they need in the first place. And if we were going to teach them to build games, it didn’t just have to be limited to the game that we were building. We could teach them to build any game they wanted. We could build a community of game makers, of people who wanted to build games and learn.

Building a game is multidisciplinary. It is collaborative. It mirrors the real-world environment of software development. Building games requires not just coding skills, but also design thinking, project management, artistic flair, and storytelling abilities. It's a microcosm of the skills needed in the modern workforce. When students collaborate on game projects, they're not just learning to code – they're learning to communicate, to compromise, to iterate on ideas. They're experiencing the challenges and triumphs of bringing a complex project to life. It's the kind of hands-on, immersive learning that sticks with you long after the final line of code is written.

Isn't that what education should be about? Not just absorbing information, but applying it. By shifting our focus from playing educational games to making them, we stumbled upon a powerful truth: the act of creation is often the best teacher of all.

This distinction between Play-To-Learn and Make-To-Learn was established. Teach a community to create.

In addition to being more powerful than the educational play patterns, it was also far cheaper. All someone needs to start that creation process is a computer and free download of a game engine, an internet connection, and if we really want to do it well, some mentorship. We bring together students in game jams and game programs all over the world and they are learning how to build software within a day.

It also turns out that creating is perhaps the most addictive “play pattern” of them all. The three most defining video games of this generation are Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite. What do they all have in common? All three have emerged as creation platforms. With Fortnite Creative and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, all three of these gaming communities have turned players into creators and made the play focused on playing what others in the community have created.

It turns out that we humans are deeply creative. It starts as young as a kid can pick up a block and stack it upon another, or build a house in Lego, or a sandcastle on the beach, and it carries with us for life, whether we are entrepreneurs building a business, artists creating our artwork, or engineers building a database. It must be hardcoded into us, for it is how we built civilization.

We realized that if we could build micro-communities around a bunch of games, then the games could grow in scope. If we could support the game creators in building better games, then eventually that community could build all of the educational games that they can dream up. They’ll dream up better ideas than we ever would.

We realized that if you want to teach by having kids play games, you need to actually have the games that live up to the standards of today’s incredible games and teach at the same time. And if you want to build those, you need to enable a community of passionate creators to build those games together. In other words, to create players, you have to create the creators first.

As Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic, the creator of Unreal Engine and Fortnite, says, “There is an entire universe in which all of the world's cool ideas and brands and creators connect together into a single space and can build anything far beyond previously envisioned limits. It is going to evolve at a far faster pace than any one company could ever build anything, because there's going to be hundreds of thousands of creators each contributing their art and their code and their ideas to it…. And it's going to take on a life of its own and really quickly transcend what it is today.”

Creation and the play have merged. The lines between player and developer have blurred.

Yes, we want to build educational games. But we dream of a world where there are hundreds of educational game titles at the budget and quality levels of the best indie games, with budgets of tens of millions of dollars. How do you do that? You teach youth to build those games.

If we want to see that vision come to life, we must first create the army of creators.

So, we rebuilt our company around this concept, and, running on fumes, rolled into the gas station, and raised a little bit of money to give this thesis a go.

We started running game jams and learning programs. The impact was the same in inner city schools and in some of the most privileged places on Earth alike. The number one challenge in education is engagement. And we found ourselves with engagement through the roof. In a school in the Bronx, one of the teachers took me aside in the hallway. She described how that kid in the back right corner of class who was so engaged is perhaps the most challenging kid at the school. As she put it, “that kid feels like he is failing from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 every day of the week, and this is the first time I've seen him light up and feel like he can be successful at something.”

When someone on my team read this, he replied, “Legit teared up at this. This was me throughout so much of school. The education system just wasn't designed for how my brain worked, didn't support me, and didn't make me feel like I could succeed.” That kid in inner city New York isn’t alone. There are so many like him. He just has fewer paths for hope. In the case of my teammate, the constant fear that he wasn’t enough turned out to be a liar. He discovered a love of the Linux desktop and that love became a feeling of belonging to a community, and from there he went on to become one of the most important influencers of the Linux desktop.

I was seeing more than just enthusiasm. I was watching kids in that class do things that our engineering team didn't know our tool could do. They then went on to enthusiastically tell me about how they learned because another kid in the class taught them. They were all discovering possibilities and automatically inheriting those insights from their friends.

In another week-long program at one of Connecticut's finest prep schools, the students were diving into Unity, going well beyond anything that we had taught them. They were describing how they had to teach themselves to code in the game in order to make their character double jump. When I had the crazy idea of asking them whether they liked Minecraft or Unity better, assuming that the answer was obviously Minecraft, almost all of them answered Unity. Why? Because we can build anything we want.

And in a recent 3-day game jam, students told me about how hard they worked. One of them slept 30 minutes. Most of them had slept 2 hours. All of them did it because they were so passionate about their games. When was the last time you saw someone do that for homework? There were no grades. Just the delight.

And then they sit there talking to me for half an hour because they are so excited to share what they are working on and to learn about what we are doing.

Teaching youth to build games has been the easiest win that I have ever been a part of. They so yearn for what we are giving them that, even when we do it badly, they latch on and soak up every last drop.

I imagine a future where people widely recognize the diverse creative disciplines involved in game making, the power of a long learning journey composed of many incremental steps toward proficiency, and the implicit assumption that learning must be rooted in activities that resemble real-world success, and grounded in experiences that can inspire engagement and joy in youth. An education that combines these elements can ultimately guide individuals toward their future, opening doors to opportunities they might never have envisioned.

But now the question is, how do you scale that?