The Educational Value of a Task

I witnessed something remarkable while testing an idea. It felt like a marketplace forming in real time. To my left stood a game studio lead discussing his team's capacity constraints. To my right, four talented Emirati women from our program. I turned to the studio lead: "What if these students could help with specific tasks you need done - art assets, level design, the kinds of task-based work that could help your team?" His response was immediate: "Would they be good? Because if so, I'd love the help." I turned to the students: "Would you want to work on specific tasks for his game? Get real-world practice and actually ship your work?" Their faces lit up instantly, smiles beaming, heads nodding vigorously. "Of course we would want that!"

At that moment - a studio lead seeking talent on one side, students craving real opportunity on the other - I saw what I believe could be the future of education. These weren't just students eager to do homework that would be thrown away. They were potential contributors who could build something real. And right across from them was a studio ready to give them that chance.

In school, we spend years doing artificial exercises that never see the light of day, while real companies struggle to find talent and students struggle to gain experience. But what if we could bridge that gap? What if we could flip the business model of education - where you could get paid to learn? What if all your homework and problem sets were actually real-world challenges on real projects? What if the companies on the other side of those solutions actually valued those contributions and would be willing to pay for them?

This model exists in pockets today - in internships, PhD programs, and medical residencies. A medical resident serves as an underpaid support staff member while learning to become a doctor. A PhD student gets paid for research and being a teaching assistant through grants. An intern contributes to real projects while learning the ropes of their industry.

This model of learning-while-doing isn't new. It's actually the oldest form of education: apprenticeship. This is how Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and countless others learned their crafts. The master would train apprentices who would contribute real value while developing their skills.

Think of a teaching hospital. Medical students and residents aren't practicing on dummy patients - they're treating real people with real conditions. A first-year resident might start with basic patient assessments while being closely supervised. As they progress, they take on more complex procedures. Senior residents teach junior ones. Attending physicians oversee it all, providing guidance and ensuring quality. What's fascinating is that teaching hospitals often provide better care than standard hospitals because you have multiple layers of attention on each case - a detailed monitoring intern, a resident developing the treatment plan, and an attending physician providing oversight, all while the teaching process is happening.

But traditional internships can't scale to serve millions of youth. One of our co-founders helped build Activision through its early years. He describes that Activision used to get around 60,000 applications for just 30 internship spots. Like most companies, most go to those privileged enough to have connections. The challenge with traditional internships is that they require significant existing skills - most employers don't want to hire complete beginners - and they demand substantial time commitment from employers to manage and train interns, so they can't scale to serve millions of youth who need experience.

This is where the power of the open source methodology, tasks and bounties come in.

When a game is developed as an open project, the code itself can remain closed source, but by opening tasks to contributions – similar to open source projects – it creates opportunities for anyone to get involved. These contributions are structured through clearly defined tasks, allowing participants to engage meaningfully. This approach mirrors the progression of real game studios, offering contributors a chance to experience and learn the workflows and dynamics of professional game development.

A beginner might start with level design using existing assets - like placing platforms and obstacles in a 2D game. As they progress, they might take on creating simple textures for blocks or basic character animations. More advanced contributors might develop 3D art assets, write narrative extensions, or code new game mechanics. The most experienced might architect entire game systems or do the core game design.

Each contribution becomes a learning opportunity through structured feedback and mentorship. A submitted piece of work might receive multiple rounds of review, with suggestions for improvement and references to learning resources.

To be clear, when we talk about bounties, we're using a broad definition. Yes, it can be a task with a specific dollar amount attached. But it can also be competitions, or XP and badges that demonstrate their growing skills, as assignments for class credit, or work compensated through micro-equity or revenue sharing. The compensation can take many forms. The important thing is that they learn the collaborative workflows and tools used in real development processes while building portfolios with actual credits on actual games.

Quality and learning emerge naturally from the same process that professional teams use every day. When someone submits work - whether it's code, art, or design - they receive feedback through the same tools professionals use: conversation threads in GitHub issues, Google Docs comments, or in project management software. They iterate on that feedback, improving their work until it meets professional standards. The learning happens in these iterations, in the back-and-forth between contributor and reviewer.

Your teacher is a practitioner. You work for them.

This creates an organic mentorship hierarchy. More experienced contributors naturally start reviewing work from newer members, just as they would in a professional studio. A junior artist who successfully completes several art tasks becomes qualified to review similar submissions from newcomers. Their recent experience learning those same skills makes them excellent mentors - they remember the stumbling blocks and breakthroughs because they just went through them. Often the best mentor is the near-peer, the person just a few steps ahead of you.

Also, they say that the best way to learn is to teach. This peer mentor learns by mentoring.

The system is self-reinforcing. Every successful contributor becomes a potential mentor, expanding our capacity to train others. Case in point: Abzer was a student in the first cohorts that we ever ran. He volunteered to mentor in one of our programs. We eventually hired him. Today, I watched a video of Abzer doing a training session in a room full of teachers.

Most importantly, the students are motivated by real stakes - their work might actually appear in a published game. This isn't homework to be graded and forgotten; it's a portfolio piece that could be seen by thousands, or millions, of players. That reality drives a level of care and attention that's hard to replicate in traditional education.

Jasper's life was one of the core inspirations for this idea. He didn't have a high school degree, but he started contributing to tasks in the open source world. He did it for free at first, building up his skills through small contributions until he landed a job at Red Hat, and then at Endless.

This was the way that most of our engineering team on Endless OS started. Rob began as a "little pipsqueak," as I once jokingly called him, making his first commit to fix a bug in the Linux kernel. That first accepted contribution was huge - his name forever etched in the annals of Linux contributors. He kept building, from small fixes to features to leading major projects, eventually becoming one of the most respected contributors in the Linux community, until he founded the leading Linux contract development shop, and then eventually found his way to us. Thank God. His little contributions became core contributions and those became his career. The activity was the same throughout. He just kept getting better at it. Like a young Messi on the soccer field, the open source community became his opportunity to practice with the players in big leagues, even as a pipsqueak. Eventually, he became as good as the people he played with.

Schools can integrate these bounties directly into their curriculum. Instead of assigning isolated homework that gets thrown away after grading, teachers can have students work on real projects with community support. A 3D modeling assignment becomes a contribution to an actual game. A database development for a final project becomes an inventory system in a game that actually powers a real world product. The work has meaning beyond the classroom.

Even if only a fraction of contributions get merged into the final project, the educational value remains. Imagine hundreds of students creating 3D character models for the same bounty - while only one might be chosen, everyone levels up their skills, sees others' work, gets professional feedback, and participates in community discussions about the process.

The key is creating an environment like a teaching hospital for digital skills - one that can operate at scale. Open source software development has proven that distributed collaboration can work at scale. These bounties, structured in this same way, can create educational opportunities that reach a scale far beyond what traditional internships could ever provide. While this exact model is still being tested, we know that learning-through-doing works at scale. Open source projects like Linux and Mozilla have trained generations of developers through contribution-based learning. Even traditional game companies are catching on - Unity's Asset Store has enabled thousands of creators to earn money while developing their craft.

This is exactly what Endless Studios is focused on now: on proving that this model can work for education in 21st-century software skills, both hard and soft, with the engagement of games.

What if the future of education could look like where education started - apprenticeship - but at a scale that reaches millions? Where the forum is GitHub instead of the blacksmith's shop. Where you're measured by the value you add to the real world rather than arbitrary grades. Where the transition between school and work is gradual because the experiences are nearly identical. Where everything you do builds you a portfolio that employers can point to as they hire you. Where tonight's homework could reach millions if you ace it, where that homework can earn you money, and where this experience is available to everyone, everywhere. That’s what we want.

This isn't just an idealistic vision - it's a practical necessity. The traditional education system simply cannot scale to meet the growing demand for digital skills. And the future depends on it. We need solutions that can reach millions of learners while maintaining quality and providing real-world experience. Bounties offer that possibility.

When I look back at those bright eyes in the UAE, I see more than just individual possibility - I see a scalable solution to one of education's greatest challenges. Those weren't just students excited about making games; they were glimpsing a future where learning and doing are inseparable, where merit matters more than credentials, and where opportunity is democratized. Every time I see those eyes light up with possibility - whether in the UAE or anywhere else - I remember that we're getting closer to making that future a reality.