Dr. Cindy Burnett:
What happens when we treat students not just as learners, but as world builders, Designers who solve problems, make decisions, and imagine new possibilities inside story based gamified learning environments. In this episode, we explore this idea with Steven Slota and Trent Hergenrader, co authors of the World Building Workshop.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
This is the Fueling Creativ in Education podcast.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
So let’s begin. Steven Slotar is a leading educational technologist, learning theorist, and interactive storyteller who has directed major digital learning and instructional design projects for organizations such as CVS Health, Arizona State University, the University of Connecticut, intel, and Pfizer. His work blends research, game writing and instructional design to explore how game mechanics and narrative systems can strengthen engagement, creative thinking, and meaningful learning and.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Trent Hergenrader is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing and the director of the center for World Building and Storytelling at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the co editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age and Creative Writing Innovations and the author of Collaborative World Building for Writers and Gamers. Welcome to the show.

Trent Hergenrader:
Thank you.

Stephen Slota:
Thank you both so much for having us.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Well, it was super last minute and we do appreciate you coming on to the show, but you know, Stephen, we’ve had the opportunity to work together at the University of Connecticut. I’ve always wanted to bring you on the show, but, you know, when I saw your LinkedIn post about the world building workshop, I was like, okay, this is our opportunity. But before we get into that, this is kind of our first episode where we’ve had an opportunity to really get in the weeds around game based learning and gamification. And so I was wondering for both of you actually if you could just tell us a little bit about, you know, your passions for games, the interconnection with education, and a little bit of your stories of how it all kind of came together for you.

Stephen Slota:
Yeah, I can kick us off here. And Trent and I do talk about this in the prologue of the book. So if you’re interested in like, the nuts and bolts of what our childhoods were like and how we ended up in this Space, it is all in there. But generally speaking, I was a high school biology teacher who started as a result of realizing that laboratory research wasn’t for me. I initially was working as a genetic engineer and making mouse cells under a fume hood was not really fulfilling in the way that I had hoped it would be. And so I ended up gravitating toward teaching life science. I did that for a few years and was very fortunate to have an administrator who was evaluating me, who during one of our debriefs had said, you know, what do you want to do 10 years from now? Do you see yourself being an administrator? Do you want to be a professor? What do you want? And I said, well, I’d really like to be able to do something for education as a whole. And he very clearly told me, you know, yeah, if you leave the classroom, you’re going to lose the contact with those 120 students a year or so.

Stephen Slota:
But if you get into the system, you can really make change at a much higher level. And that change that you produce will sort of precipitate downward into other teachers classrooms in a way that it wouldn’t necessarily if you were just teaching your own high school biology class. And I, I really took that to heart. At the same time, two of my former professors, Roger Travis and Michael Young, both of whom were at the University of Connecticut, had just started something called the Video Games and Human Values Initiative, which was aimed at understanding how can you use playful learning or video games or tabletop games to teach in not just any particular discipline across all disciplines. So when I learned about that, I said, that’s what I want to do. That’s exactly up my alley. I love games. I love play.

Stephen Slota:
I think they’re fascinating as applications in a classroom. I had already been integrating some of that into my work as a high school teacher, both in terms of using games like Spore or World of Warcraft to explain the scientific method or evolution by natural selection. And I thought, okay, well, what if I do something with this? What if I start exploring the different mechanisms you can use and the learning theories that support them as a way to help improve engagement and creativity in the classroom space? And this was really important to me, especially because I was working in a relatively impoverished area, or at least with students who were low tracked and often came from broken families, very difficult circumstances. And school had always been, for lack of a better word, really challenging or bad for them. It was just a bad experience all around. And I thought, here’s something we could be doing that is Broadly accessible. It’s something that any teacher can learn how to incorporate. And really, it services all of these principles that folks like John Dewey and W.E.B.

Stephen Slota:
du Bois and Lev Vygotsky and all of these other learning theorists they had been talking about for 100 years that just hadn’t been implemented in a way that felt satisfying as somebody in the classroom. So I went back to school, graduate school, to study that. And my career over the last 15 years has been a trajectory grown from thinking about what does play mean and how can it inform all of these skills that are so important that we don’t actually measure, like critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and empathy.

Trent Hergenrader:
Yeah. And for me, it’s sort of funny because we met at the Games Learning Society conference, the GLS conference in Madison, as we were both graduate students and both just getting into this exciting new world of games and education. But for me, growing up, I basically, from as long as I can remember, I was doing three things. Writing fiction, playing tabletop role, playing games, and playing soccer. Went on to college at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Thought I was going to go become an English professor of literature at that time. And I didn’t really get into anywhere that I wanted to go and wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with myself. But I ended up getting a job at the U.S.

Trent Hergenrader:
soccer Federation that just landed in my lap. So went for a couple years, followed around men’s and women’s national teams, things like that. So that was an absolute dream for me. Moved out to Washington State, helped run some of their youth soccer programs. But I eventually decided I wanted to get back into the world of writing fiction. And when I started writing fiction and started publishing some short stories, I realized I was not going to be able to make a career out of writing fiction very quickly. So I decided to go back to graduate school. And during this, I was terrified.

Trent Hergenrader:
2006 is when I started, terrified I wasn’t going to be able to get a job. So I started thinking, okay, well, I’m really into writing. I’ll be a writing specialist. And was looking into digital writing in composition, digital writing in professional writing, and then digital writing in creative writing. And while there was a wealth of scholarship on the first two, there was almost nothing in digital creative writing. And one of my advisors said, you know, you should check out what’s going on in the game space, because that’s where the most interesting digital narratives are sort of working. So I got into the games and learning sort of material I was reading. There was a very clear point in which I was reading James Paul G’s what Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

Trent Hergenrader:
And playing Fallout 3 while teaching my first section of Intro to Creative Writing. And what I was finding was that my students were trying to manufacture stories that sort of felt or seemed like a good story to them rather than coming out of anything that they like, actually had to say. So it’s more like, what can I say about the world? And then how can I write a story that’s going to, you know. And it’s like. And it’s just really not very authentic for a 19 or a 20 year old, especially when they’re trying to Write like a 19th century British gentleman. And when I started playing Fallout, it was the first role playing game that I played in a number of years. And I started thinking, wait a minute, I’m searching through this world based on how I created my character. You know, whether I want to sneak up on people or whether I want to attack from a distance or whether I want to fast talk them or whatever.

Trent Hergenrader:
And the world shapes my decisions. You know, if I’m not set up to fight something, I got to run away or figure out something else. So I started thinking, okay, wait a minute, this would be a pretty good way of teaching fiction writing to students to say like, hey, look, let’s forget about plot. Just think about your character. Where does your character come from? What do they want to do? And we’ll let the plot happen through their decisions. And at the same time, I was going to the Fallout Vault wiki, which is a free fan created website, to find out about every little person, place and thing that I could, that I was coming across in this world. And I said, hey, you know what? You could also do that. You could have everybody in a class create a couple people, couple places, couple things, and we could populate a world and then just go explore it with tabletop role playing games, right? So this is my point of the story where I finally talked one of my advisors after like going in every time for his office hours and begging and begging to be able to teach a class like this.

Trent Hergenrader:
And they were not keen on it. They finally let me, I think, just to, you know, shut me up. And we created in this was in 2011, we created a post apocalyptic version of Milwaukee where the students were all supposed to create 10 entries, 25 students, 10 entries each. We’d have 250 entries and then we would go play. We were using the Vampire the Masquerade role playing game. We skinned that for the tabletop game because it’s pretty, pretty easy to learn and wasn’t all about combat. There’s social and sort of intellectual challenges with that as well. And this was the most incredible experience to this day of my entire teaching career because I had no idea what I was really getting into.

Trent Hergenrader:
I structured it pretty well, I think built a pretty good on ramp for these students. And the thing that struck me, they absolutely loved when we got to the role playing part in the last third of the class, they absolutely loved the role playing. And they said, you need to do this forever, which I have been doing. But the thing that I became fascinated with was how we never really talked about how the world worked. And every, everybody made their own assumptions about how this world would work. And I started thinking, now isn’t that interesting that every one of these writers is creating their own version of this same world in order to tell the stories that they want to tell. But in our world, we all inhabit the same planet, we all inhabit the same cities, right? Are we all doing that same sort of thing? And the answer is sort of yes. Right? We all have things that we commonly agree on that, you know, you don’t jump off a 10 story building, you don’t step out in front of a moving truck because of physics.

Trent Hergenrader:
But like if you’re driving in a neighborhood late at night and a policeman pulls you over, your reaction to that experience is going to be very much based on who you are, what car you’re driving, what neighborhood you’re in, whether you feel like you’re supposed to be there or not supposed to be there. And you could have 10 people get pulled over at the same place and have 10 completely different reactions and experiences just based on that loan sort of experience. So my first book, Collaborative World Building for Writers and Gamers, was doing this for saying, let’s create really diverse environments for gamers and for fiction writers to explore. And then after that book came out and it’s done well with Bloomsbury, it came out in 2018, I got an email from MIT Press saying, would you like to do this? Only do it for real world problems. And I said, sure. It’s, it’s March 2020 and the whole world has been put on pause. So I’ve got all the time in the world, right? Turned out to be a huge mistake saying yes at that time. But at the end of the day, that was where this book got its genesis was something that I mentioned in one of the latter chapters of Collaborative World Building for Writers and Gamers is, hey, you could do this for real world problems too.

Trent Hergenrader:
And it kind of took off from there.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
I really want to build more on the world building piece because it’s so fascinating and we’re definitely going to get into it. But before we get too far, I just wanted to talk a little bit about this idea, gamification and game based learning. It’s something that I remember coming out, I think in the 2000 and tens, it was someone getting popular. We had these 3D virtual worlds. I remember kind of like developing some kind of game based activities within the 3D virtual worlds. But I know that sometimes these words get used interchangeably. Not everyone always fully understands what they mean. Maybe there’s particular subjects where we’re seeing some success more than others.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
So I was wondering if you guys could just share some of your wealth of knowledge around game based learning gamification and also provide some examples of the differences as well.

Stephen Slota:
Yeah, that’s a great question and it’s one that we try to answer as often as possible. Trent and I used to be very much about proselytizing from the church of game based learning to people and very quickly realized that actually this probably isn’t the best way to do it because everyone’s conception of what we’re talking about is completely different. So often you’ll see journalistic outlets or even just K12 teachers talk about gamification in business, in corporate environments, like I’ve worked with in the past and currently working with. They’ve talked about this as well. And they think gamification means take all the points and scores and the operant conditioning elements that games incorporate, leaderboards, for example. That we’re just going to port that into whatever we’re doing and that’s going to solve the problem of engagement. And I think of that as being a very, very narrow understanding of what games afford players. And I think one of the best experiences that I had had as I was developing this interest in playful learning was realizing that so much of what was effective about games had nothing to do with them being video games versus tabletop or the points and scores.

Stephen Slota:
I mentioned this before we actually started recording, but one of the things that I had to struggle with as a teacher was the district I was working with had so few resources that it wasn’t possible to buy everybody a laptop or an iPad or a Chromebook or the equivalent. And this was in about 2008-2011. And so I had to think pretty broadly about like, what can we be doing here to make these activities, these various kinds of approaches to education more accessible to a wider audience. We just didn’t have the technology. And so I started considering, okay, what can you do with pen and paper? What can you do with imagination? And sort of fell into tabletop role playing as being a solution here. And I had played Dungeons and Dragons for a long time prior to this. I had played video games for a long time prior, but that was the first time it all crystallized for me where I said, the thing that works about games and education has nothing to do with the technological element of it. That’s one factor, but it’s not the definitive factor.

Stephen Slota:
What actually matters is learner agency and your ability as an instructor to guide from the side rather than be a SA on the stage. You’re not supposed to tell them what to do. And I used to tell my future teachers, I was running the educational technology program at UConn and I would teach future teachers. One of the things I would say to them is, you need to think much more about what you’re doing to get your learners to put themselves into these environments instead of you just dictating to them what they need to be doing. And Trent mentioned Fallout 3. So I’m going to pick that as an example here. But one of the benefits of games like Fallout 3 or Baldur’s Gate 3 or any other role playing game you might try is that they really do position you as the user, as the player, as the learner, to go into the world and engage in inquiry, that you are asking questions, you are doing research, you’re basically replicating all the things we want schools to teach learners how to do. And the best way to do that is to drop them into a world and say, figure it out, like, what is going on? And there are a lot of considerations regarding the way that formal structures of education work.

Stephen Slota:
Like we are trapped in an alphanumeric grading paradigm. We do have to think about what the limited resources look like from a time perspective. So you only have so many days of school in a year. How are we going to spend that time? How much of that experience can be anchored or inquiry driven versus standardized, test based and memorization based? Our argument ends up being that the benefit of playful learning or game based learning is not the gamification stuff. It’s not the points and scores and leaderboards. And it is the openness of these worlds for learners to be able to explore them and ask questions and then answer those questions in ways that make sense for them from their perspective. And Trent alluded to this earlier, talking a little bit about identity and how we all incorporate elements of the worlds into our experiences, into our life worlds in different ways. And so if we want to create effective educational environments and incorporate elements of playfulness, that just means finding opportunities for learners to exert agency so that they can decide for themselves themselves.

Stephen Slota:
What is the story of my learning going to be? How am I going to tell other people what I learned and why it mattered to me, and how I’m going to apply this in the future? How am I going to organize this in a beginning, middle and end structure that would be cognizable to another person down the road? And we do this all the time in all environments. Game designers and educators have effectively the same job. Like they are trying to teach people how to take these skills and apply them in a meaningful environmental context. And our job is, as educators specifically, is to get learners to transfer that information or transfer those skills from outside the learning context into the real world. So whereas educators are trying to focus on transfer, game designers are thinking about, how can I help a player who I don’t have any direct contact with? It’s all abstracted, it’s all removed. How am I going to teach them how to interact with this world I’ve created? And my job at the University of Connecticut, being interdisciplinary, was essentially to study what are the overlaps there? And how can we leverage playful learning in ways that are not just gamification and not just serious games. That’s another term you hear thrown around a lot. So much of this doesn’t have to be serious.

Stephen Slota:
It depends on the context. It depends on the information you’re communicating. It depends on the potential for historical trauma to be emergent from these activities. But the entire thing is really centered on what am I doing with the information, what am I actively knowing when I go out into the world and do this stuff. And I use frequently this comparison or metaphor where I could ask my learners how to bake a cake, and they might be able to regurgitate some list of instructions that would tell me how to do that. But that’s very different from asking them how to bake the cake and having them produce the cake so that I can do a taste test. And what game based learning or playful learning accomplishes is that it allows the learners to do that construction of the thing I want them to learn in a way that I, as the evaluator or educator, can go back and try for myself and say, yeah, you really get it, or no, you don’t. And here’s where you might want to make Some improvements down the road.

Stephen Slota:
Trent, do you want to kind of piggyback on that?

Trent Hergenrader:
Yeah. Because I think, you know, my. My short and dirty way of distinguishing between gamification and then other types of using games in learning is. I think the best examples of gamification are duolingo, using your Fitbit. The game itself is completely disassociated from the action. It’s usually an action that you’re not looking forward to doing, or it’s grunt work that you don’t want to have to do. So you put something over the top of it that makes it a little bit palatable. Right.

Trent Hergenrader:
So studying vocab for a foreign language is kind of dull, but I guess if you have an owl cheering you on and you get a badge every so often, you know, where you walk more steps than your neighbor, then you feel more accomplished. Accomplished. Right. It gives you some sort of motivation. And it’s one of the things where I think gamification flamed out in K through 12, because in order for that to work, you need to approach it as though people do not want to be doing this work. Right. Students do not want to be doing this. That turns out to be a pretty lousy.

Trent Hergenrader:
You know, if it’s losing weight, you know, if it’s exercising. Well, yeah, we’d all rather eat potato chips on the couch, probably. But the idea is you’re using a game. And this is something else, too, that I would say that where I got started was with G’s book, what video games have to teach us but learning and literacy. And one of the things that is a major misunderstanding about that book from people who haven’t actually read it is that he’s not advocating for people to bring games in to the classroom. He’s saying, you can do that, and that can be great. But the thing is, we need to be thinking about how games teach people to play them and how we can change our educational spaces. So we’re doing those same kind of experiential, contextual kinds of things rather than this sort of textbook dissociated learning.

Trent Hergenrader:
Right. So that’s where, you know, in. In the book, he does talk like Steve was just saying. He’s talking a lot about learning theories and different kinds of learning outcomes. And the point of the book is, well, video games actually align very well with those kinds of outcomes. Right. Like, so this is where what I’m trying to do in my fiction writing classes is to get students to think about the world from a character’s perspective and the decisions that they’re making. And a tabletop role playing game is the perfect thing to get them to do that, right? And what I’ve found over the years, and this is something else too, that I’ve had a number of colleagues who, who have tried without really knowing what they were doing.

Trent Hergenrader:
They bring a game in and they just expect it to work and everyone’s going to be super engaged. And the thing is, the engagement drives the fun, right? If that’s the point is the students are feeling like, I understand this, I’m making strategies, I’m making moves, and I want to see how the results come out. As opposed to, I’m going to take a topic and, you know, it’s the French Revolution, so I’ll have him play Assassin’s Creed and that’ll give him a sense of, you know, revolutionary France. And it’s like, well, does that actually work? Because they’re playing plenty of video games on their own time, right? Like, what, how are you connecting this to the content? And anytime I’ve met people who’ve done that, they’re like, oh, that was my one and only time. And it just completely fizzled. And I’m like, oh, well, if you want to sit down, like, let’s figure out what are the mechanics that the game that you want to play is offering you and then what are the learning outcomes? If we can’t align those, we probably should find a new game, right? And it’s like once you start to find the game that fits, then it’s like, okay, well, now that works. And you can kind of customize it however you want, but the idea that the game is going to be the part that drives the interest and drives the engagement. Students are playing games on their phone, on their consoles, on their PCs.

Trent Hergenrader:
They don’t need any more games, but for them, I mean, I’ve got two boys who are now 13 and 16, and gaming is a literacy. And it’s a literacy that they have that, for example, their grandparents don’t really. So when you’ve got educators who are, in my case, Gen X or Steve’s case, millennials, who grew up with games, and you can talk to them using that vocabulary, you just sort of put fun off to the side, right? Like, you can play a game that’s not very fun and still learn a lot or get a lot out of it, right? So it’s all of these separations of what people, I think, who are not very big into games don’t understand. And then when they get the gamification stuff, it’s like, oh, well, of course it’s about talking to the owl and making it fun. And then it’s like, okay, but that’s one little piece and not the best piece. The best piece is messy and requires a lot of engagement. And this is where I’ll end on this point. You have to invest in the educators.

Trent Hergenrader:
You don’t invest in the technology because the technology can’t take you there. You need the educator who is going to be helping the students understand. So it doesn’t matter if you’re playing SimCity or a board game or whatever. The technology is, like Steve said, is not the driving factor. The driving factor is how you’ve set up your assignments. So the game is leveraging the kind of things that you want and the students are able to explore, make their own kind of realizations, you know, maybe scribble outside the lines a little bit just to see what happens. And that’s all much better learning, right? But it’s terrible in terms of being able to have metrics and like all of the data driven stuff that we’re so obsessed with right now. I mean, we in education, it’s like, well, that’s not the good stuff that we know is good learning.

Trent Hergenrader:
And it just so happens that gamification isn’t going to get you to good learning either. It’ll get you to metrics, but it won’t get you to good learning.

Stephen Slota:
Just to underline really quickly what Trent was saying there that I neglected to say. But the biggest difference, I think, between gamification and game based learning or instructional game design is that you really, really want to focus on that one to one alignment between the game objective or the play objective and the activity objective. Because if your goal is to induce transfer that you want learners to take what they’re learning in the educational context, and it doesn’t have to be K12, it could be higher ed, it could be corporate healthcare, military, whatever. There has to be as little barrier as possible for that transfer to occur. You want to make it as near as possible for it to occur. So by aligning the game objective, the play objective, with the activity objective, you are effectively positioning the learners to do the thing in the classroom that you want them to do outside of the classroom. And the closer you can bring those two things, the more likely it is you’re going to be able to induce that transfer that you’re looking for. That one to one ratio is the, I think, sort of the skeleton key to making all of this work, that you need to make sure that you are minimizing barriers to transfer so that the learners can see for themselves without too much coaching, without the need for somebody over their shoulder, so they can see how this stuff actually applies in their day to day life.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Okay, so in the, in the nature of games, we’re going to do a simulation.

Stephen Slota:
Okay.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Okay. So I am a teacher. Well, I am a teacher, but I’m a teacher. I’m a K through 12 teacher. I teach high school and I don’t know very much about games other than I used to play Super Mario Brothers, which I was obsessed with when I was, was a kid. Other than that, I don’t really know about games. I really want to talk about world building. I want to bring world building workshop into my classroom.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Can I teach anything?

Stephen Slota:
Trent, why don’t you take. Take that first?

Trent Hergenrader:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s. Again, it’s one of the questions that I would start out with. And I mean, I’ve got. Both of us have a good amount of experience doing this with people who really don’t know what it is that they want to do. They just want to do something new and different.

Stephen Slota:
Yes.

Trent Hergenrader:
And really you start with, okay, well, what are the criteria that you need, especially with K through 12? And this is not my area at all. I don’t have to worry about Common Core and things like that in higher ed. But what is the result that you’re going to need? Like, what is it you’re going to need to be able to demonstrate that the students have learned? Right. Is it going to be success on an exam? Is it going to be a product that they need to create? Right. And then sort of working from that to, okay, there’s a lot of different things that we can design the learning experience to be about, whether it’s about different perspectives or whether it’s about being a little cog in a gigantic machine, you know what I mean? And how much control do you have if you, you know, you don’t want Social Security to go away? Well, okay, you as an individual, you can’t control that. So then what are the ways? Right, so there’s varieties of things that you’re going to need to think through before you even get started with the world building stuff. Because the world building stuff is really about differences of perspectives and that nobody has a grip on the objective truth. And we all learn more.

Trent Hergenrader:
Not even the educator, not even the person in front of the room has a monopoly on what is objectively true in the world. They may have more experience, and that’s what they’re trying to, you know, help their students with is drawing from their own life experience and drawing from different things. But the idea is that, you know, if someone in the class says, well, it doesn’t work that way, that life doesn’t seem to work that way for me, you need to pause for a second and listen and say, okay, well, what is that? What is that going on? And does that matter in the sort of the scenario that you’re trying to develop? And then all sorts of other questions that go into it? I mean, this is what the second section of the book is actually all about. How much time do you want to have? Do you want to do this for one afternoon? Do you want to do this for a unit? Do you want to do this for a semester? Do you want to do it for a year? Because there’s lots of different ways, depending on how much, you know, you can dip in and out of it with lots of other activities. Are you bound to a certain curriculum? Right? These are all the questions that you need to get out on the table before you even start jumping in. And it’s very much like I always say, that both Collaborative World Building for Writers and Gamers and the World Building Workshop are both like, if the Dungeons and Dragons metaphor works, it’s the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Monster Manual, and the Player’s Handbook. There is no set. Go play the game.

Trent Hergenrader:
When you have those three books, you have to lay out the groundwork for what is the kind of game that you want to play, who’s all going to play all those kind of things. You just can’t say, oh, come over to my house and we’ll start playing, right? And it’s very much that same kind of thing that if we gave this. But we, you know, we’ve given this book to 10 different educators in different fields or whatever. They will come up with 10 different strategies. And as long as it’s like, you know, like 10 different groups will play 10 different types of D and D, and it’s all fine, right? It’s like the rules are there for you to. You can fudge them when you want to, but they give you some structure. But then it’s almost an infinite structure for you to be able to work in. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

Trent Hergenrader:
And again, sort of activate this for the educators as well, because this is one of the things that I think Steve and I would both say is that we’ve never had anybody come back and say, I’m never doing that again. We’ve been doing this for, you know, since 2012, 2013. Everyone comes back and says, I’m going to try it a little bit different next time because I felt like I was on the verge and now it’s like, I want to try it again. So being an educator and being able to say I get to manipulate this a little bit, it and then when you strike gold, you know it, right? Like faces light up the room just sort of has energy. Like one of my problems that I consistently have, and I call this a problem, is students not wanting to leave the world building class when our class is over. Because everybody just has one more thing they want to say to their group, right? And there’s classes waiting in the hall. And I’m like, I’m really sorry that my students don’t want to leave my class. They’ve only been here for an hour and 15 minutes, right? So those are the kind of things that again, I try and model the fact that like, like you can see the results and it gives you a lot of leeway.

Trent Hergenrader:
You need to completely rethink how you want to approach teaching. And like what, where are you going to put your hours? Where are you going to put your effort? Because that all changes too. And if you’re not willing to at least be a co learner with the students, there may be other options for you because world building particularly may not be a good one. If you’re not willing to really kind of trust the students to be the leaders and you just kind of. Or they’re the engine and you’re just the one steering the project. If you’re not willing to give them that control, then you’re probably not going to have a very successful world building workshop. Because it’s that idea that you’re maintaining the control of what is true and what is right. And I think this extends.

Trent Hergenrader:
You know, I don’t know much about early, early childhood education, but I imagine that this extends with proper scaffolding all the way down to, you know, kindergarten, first grade, second grade. As long as the work is age appropriate, then I think even adults can learn from small people too.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
So let’s go back to the simulation. I feel like I’m missing a little piece here. So I’m in world building and I want to teach my students about the 50 states where they’re all located. And I want them to be able to walk away with understanding where all the states are located. So where do you even start with me as an educator? I need some more clarification around how you get started and what is it? Give us a little bit more detail.

Stephen Slota:
Yeah, I think I can elaborate a little bit on this crossover between what it is to be a good world builder versus just standard traditional teaching. And as I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest similarities between educators and game designers is you’re always trying to figure out how do I get my audience to understand a thing and then apply it somewhere? I think that’s where I keep going back to. As Trent mentioned, you figure out your learning objectives and then work backward from your assessment measures to what you’re going to instruct or how you’re going to scaffold that. And we make this argument in the book as well. Most of what we’re describing is just good instructional design practice or good principles of instructional design. So if you have developed a curriculum or if you’ve designed a lesson in the past, none of this is, should be foreign to you. Like this is the same stuff you’re hearing about in your teacher education program. It’s the same stuff you’ve learned going through, say if you’re a corporate trainer, that you would have learned as part of that development process.

Stephen Slota:
And often you’ll have a professional development that’ll tell you you should go on and focus on inquiry driven research. You should focus on these kind of anchored projects. And I approach this as a situated cognitivist. That’s sort of my theoretical wheelhouse as an educational psychologist and technologist. And I look at the works of both Seymour Papert and Jerome Bruner, as well as the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, which developed the Jasper Woodberry laserdisc series in the 1990s, or if you’re, if you’re of the same age cohort as me, you might have tried Jasper Woodberry, you might have done the Voyage of the Mimi, which was another sort of inquiry driven video series. And the reason why I point to those is because they were all about anchoring instruction in a narrative. And that’s really what this is. It’s about case studies.

Stephen Slota:
How are you developing case studies where these skills or this knowledge is relevant? So in the case of the simulation or the 50 states you’re talking about, the first thing I would ask is, okay, what am I writing as my learning objective? So what is the Bloom’s taxonomy verbiage I want to use? How am I thinking about how I’m going to assess this? Is it going to be a quiz? Is it going to be an open ended assessment? Am I to have the students tell me about all these states? And then from there, working backward to say, what is the. The best way to align the kind of instruction I’m doing with the kind of assessment I’m doing to, again, minimize that barrier to transfer so these learners will be able to go out into the world and use that knowledge of the 50 states in some way. All of that is independent of game design stuff. Like, you don’t need to know anything about Super Mario Brothers or Fallout or any of these other things we’re talking about to be able to do good instructional design. And so I recommend to folks, regardless of whatever your theoretical framework is, you want to have a theoretical framework, you want to think about what is the relationship between my instruction and the assessment measures and the technologies that are available to us, all of which I saw you had interviewed at one point, Punya Mishra, who came up with the TPack model. Right. One of the things we argue is this blend of the addie instructional design process with the TPACK model so that you’re thinking really carefully about what am I developing, how am I developing it, and how am I going to ultimately deliver it. And that part should be something that anyone in your audience should be able to grapple with as an educator.

Stephen Slota:
Like, it really is independent of the game stuff. Now, as Trent was saying, it comes back to engagement. Like, what am I doing to engage my students with this? It doesn’t have to be exactly what he was describing with roleplay. You know, there might be situations where role play isn’t appropriate, it’s too dangerous, it’s too expensive, it’s too time consuming. But you can think about, how could we do this in a sort of third person, distant way? How can we have the students embody these characters or think about those people, places, and things in ways that allow them to recognize the various social forces that impact them? So in the case of teaching the 50 states, I think one of the things I would gravitate towards is thinking about, why are there 50 states? How did those states come into being? What does it mean that they’re divided the way they are? Why do they all look so weird? Like, why aren’t they just squares? Right. Like. And there are all these other interesting questions you can have students engage with. Now, this is obviously going to be differentiated based on the grade band you’re working with, the level of the students, the specific discipline you’re operating within.

Stephen Slota:
So if I want my students to think like a scientist, that is going to look a little bit different than my students thinking like a linguist or thinking like a historian. But the same principles are still undergirding the entire thing. It’s just good instructional design that’s driven by learning objective writing that you’re going to have to work backward from your learning objectives that hopefully are going to be aligned with whatever standards you’re working with, whether it’s Common Core or ngss, or if you’re in higher education or a corporate environment, they’re going to look a little bit different as well.

Trent Hergenrader:
Yeah, I mean, I just want to throw in here real quick because I was. As Steve was talking is this happens all the time when we’re doing our podcast, too. He’s talking, and my brain starts racing. So one of the things that I would say is, like, we need to have these students learn the 50 states. And the first question is, why? Like, this is exactly, you know, like, let’s deconstruct that. How much time do we have to do this? And, you know, my approach would be something along the lines of, you know, you’ve got a room full of students, who knows what state this is? You know what I mean? And then like, well, what do we know about this state? And they may not know anything about some of these states. Well, where would we find out information about this state? We find out that Washington State and Oregon are very, very wet and green on the western side, but they’re actually quite arid on, you know, on the other side of the mountains. Texas is hot, Florida is muggy.

Trent Hergenrader:
You know, all these kind of things and start to get them, rather than just thinking, Florida is the one that looks like a, you know, a foot or whatever at the bottom. Start them thinking about, oh, yeah, well, Florida’s where Disney World is and where the Marlins play and, you know, let them get their interests. Are you interested in football? Are you interested in baseball? Like, where are those teams? Which conferences are they in? So instead of just learning the 50 states, they start learning about, what does it mean if you were in. And like, I was thinking one of the exams that I would want to have is less, you know, what is this state? But, you know, you are. We have 50 cards that each one with the state have the four seasons or, you know, 12 months or whatever, and say, okay, well, it’s now May in Delaware. What would you expect to see? What would. What kind of clothes would you be wearing? What kind of food do you think would you would be eating? Right? Because they would need to know where in the country that is, what the environment is. And that is a much richer question than, can you just pin 50 states? Onto a map.

Trent Hergenrader:
Well, sure, you know, what, Oklahoma. But what do you know about Oklahoma other than it’s got the long panhandle, right? So this is where, you know, trying to get like, why do we care if you know what the 50 states are? Well, it turns out you’re probably better off knowing a lot about some of them than even, you know, if you’re not quite sure where Delaware ends and Maryland begins. You know, it’s like, is that that’s maybe not the biggest problem in the, you know, biggest thing in the world? It would be more important to know, okay, well, this culture is based on, you know, these kinds of cuisines and this kind of demographics versus Southern California or Texas or something like that. And then it’s like, oh, well, of course I know where North Dakota is, because we talked about it, and that’s where they, you know, they, they. Or Idaho, you know, they grow the potatoes or whatever, right? It’s like, that’s why they know where it is, not because they just memorized a map. I mean, the whole idea of just memorizing where the 50 states are, that is a gamification question, right? That is a. How can you create a little app where you just drag the state over a million times until you burn it into your memory? And that’s not good education that, you know, a student will forget that within a week. But if it’s like, oh, well, yeah, you remember that state where your grandparents live and what it was like when you visited them over Thanksgiving? That’s a memory that you will retain.

Trent Hergenrader:
And it’s like, oh, right, that’s why we go south for spring break, because it’s cold in Maine. And the way, you know, it’s a. It’s those kind of things where you can bring their personal experience. And then the gainful part of it is. I’m not going to try and get you with a gotcha question. You know, there are 50 states. You know, we have 12 months, right? So if we’re just going to shuffle this deck, it’s like a game. It’s game like, it’s playful.

Trent Hergenrader:
Here’s the state, here’s the month. You tell me, what do you know, right? It’s a totally different kind of experience.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
I mean, I’m just shifting gears. I mean, the connection to the learning objective, you know, is. Is obviously a critical piece of this. And I think the gamification element is obviously. I thought the duolingo was a great example, and we see so many of these different games. And I know a lot of My kids at school are kind of like doing these math things and it’s like, you know, there’s loads of gamification elements on the, on the screen. But what I’m hearing with that game based learning is that freedom to choose. And if we look at that, you know, students will be able to explain what it means to buy and sell items and describe how people make choices based on needs, wants and available money.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
It might be. I’ve been up to the Rochester Museum of Play, I think it is. They’ve got that great supermarket, right? And so, so we used to see that, right? In the early ages we’d have the home corner and sometimes you turn the home corner into a shop and you’re buying and selling goods and kids are interacting with real money. And so there’s some role playing and unfortunately I feel like there’s less of that happening now. But if you facilitated that activity really well, Steven, to your point, you’re kind of guiding on the side and allowing them to kind of go and problem solve all of those interactions, hopefully buying something for the right value, exchanging the money, coming away with the right change, but likewise. And the reason why I wanted to make this connection is that during the Thanksgiving break, my son is obsessed with restaurant tycoon. So he’s nine. I was like, all right, let me make an effort to go and co play with him.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
We went to the coffee shop, but when we was kind of like, I built my restaurant and I was like, wow, you know, like I was having to work out how to be the most efficient in my restaurant to make sure I’m turning around the tables. So I’m using my money to get waiters because I’m making the connection that they’re probably the best value for money because they can turn around the tables quicker to make more money while I’ll do the cooking. And so that’s in it. That’s more of a technological approach. But the freedom and openness with restaurant tycoon still moves it more towards that kind of like game based learning, which I also hear you’re talking more around playful learning. So when you look at it that perspective, probably every single educator right now has the opportunity to bring in some playful learning. Even, even my eldest, my eighth grade student, some of his most fondest memories is history class is where they’re playing judges. And to your point, Trent, they found something in history.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
There’s a dispute between two states and they’re having to basically pretend that they’re judges and trying to win the debate. And even Those kind of like when you’re pretending to be historical figures debating in court. That, to me, sounds to a certain extent playful learning. And of course, it allows for that transfer of knowledge as well, because what you’ve learned, you’re not having to apply in this playful game environment. Now, if you don’t mind, just because we’re getting tight, I want to shift gears within those examples I’ve shared. And because we’re a creativity podcast, there’s so much creative thinking and creativity and problem solving within that. And to a certain extent, the more freedom you provide in that game, the more creativity that might come along as well. I mean, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that creativity and problem solving piece that we know are so powerful in games.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
And for any educators that want to particularly facilitate those elements, the advice that you might have when they’re trying to bring in some kind of playful learning experiences.

Stephen Slota:
Yeah, I’ll tackle that one, I think. Well, first, I know that you’ve previously interviewed Ron Bigetto and James Kaufman, who are sort of preeminent thinkers on creativity. And I used to work with both of them. They’re great guys, very smart. And one of the things that we aligned very closely on was this idea of how the 4C model that they discuss is a good fit for playful learning and gamification, or playful learning and the instantiation of games in the classroom. And one of the reasons for that is because it allows you as the educator to focus on either the little or mini C elements of creativity versus the big C and pro C levels of creativity and then really do a deconstruction of what are those things. Now, I want to tie this back to something you had said, Matt, because I think it’s a really interesting example that I use all the time, the way we teach math, right? That math Blaster allows you to input the solution to some algorithm and then blow up an asteroid to keep it from hitting the Earth. Right? That’s quintessentially gamification.

Stephen Slota:
It’s all about put in the right number, get the little thing to blow up, you get your reward, it gives you your dopamine, and you move on to the next thing. Whereas the role play of going into the supermarket or the example of playing restaurant tycoon, right, Those are forcing you to grapple with complex systems. And so when we think about creativity in the context of playful learning, when we think about trying to teach creativity, we’re trying to give students opportunities to exert mini and little C or big C And Pro C even, you know, depending on the trajectory of an individual learner. I guess when you’re thinking about how to create those opportunities, really what you’re doing is figuring out, where can I insert some contact with these complex systems using a node that those learners have already touched in some way or been a part of in some way. Like, we are all embedded in complex systems all the time. We just don’t think about it because it’s overwhelming. Right? Like, if we’re going out into the world, I find myself doing this all the time. Like, I’m driving down the road and thinking about what is that person driving the opposite way? Wonder what they’re up to today.

Stephen Slota:
I wonder what they’re thinking about. Wonder what matters to them, what they know that I don’t know. Right. And the benefit of approaching education this way, understanding that everything is complicated and there is no such thing as capital T truth that is objectively real, that we’re able to sort of negotiate as educators with our learners to think about, what do you really care about? How does this complex system fit into your universe? How do you see yourself fitting into that complex system down the road? And then everything that you do from that point forward should essentially be, how am I creating in this space? And this is why I brought up papert. It’s the reason why I talk a lot about constructionism and constructivism in the context of education is because learners really are building their understanding of a thing. They’re not just receptacles for us to dump information into. They’re human beings with experiential sets that we need to be thinking about when they come into the classroom. And when I went through teacher education myself, they talked a lot about differentiation, and often it was framed in the context of easy, medium, hard.

Stephen Slota:
Like you have to come up with three versions of a thing, and then you allocate those to the students who need the easy, medium or hard. What we’re talking about here is, I think, as Trent mentioned, a richer set of circumstances where we’re telling the students, no, you teach me. Like, you tell me about how this thing is relevant to your life. And the creativity element, the fostering of creativity, comes from that interaction where we’re asking them as experts to exert their strengths in ways that are going to inform and enrich my life world based on their particular experiences with the environments they’re a part of. And I used to tell my students this all the time. Like, even if we’re all sitting in the same classroom, we’re not in the same room. There are infinite rooms for us to be sitting in. All of us are bringing in our experiential baggage in different ways, and we’re all going to focus our attention on different things.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Things.

Stephen Slota:
So my job as the educator is not to make sure that you are learning some specific thing to then tell me about on a test. It’s to focus on the education of intention and attention. What am I getting you to intend to do with this information? And how am I getting you to attend to the right things in the environment, to be able to apply this in a way that’s going to be meaningful to you in the context in which you operate? So the creativity element is just part and parcel of all of this. The that if we’re creating case studies or anchored learning experiences or other kinds of activities where students have to exert inquiry and think about where does this material mesh with myself as a person, then we’re going to naturally get them to be creative because of the fact that only they can speak to how a piece of information or a skill is relevant to them. And it’s something that you can’t fake with an AI LLM. You know, you can’t go to ChatGPT and ask it, what do I feel like about this specific thing? Or how does it map to my experience? Because nobody is going to be able to synthesize that information in the way that you can with all of your experiential information, experiential perception, your understanding of affordances in the environment.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
That is excellent, particularly the last point. And I think that intention versus attention was a wonderful way of wrapping that up. You’ve given us so much to kind of really reflect on. I mean, we really wanted an episode that kind of introduced gamification and playful learning. You’ve done that. So we really thank you. We are really, really crunched for time, so we’re gonna have to wrap it up here. But I was wondering before you go, when is the book coming out and where do our listeners go to if they want to learn a little bit more about world building?

Stephen Slota:
So the book is out now. If you’re listening to this, the book will have come out at the beginning of December. There is both a print edition that’ll be available through MIT Press as well as other booksellers. And we are producing an audiobook edition that will be narrated by me. So if you. If you like the dulcet tones of my voice, that is available as an option as well. And we do produce, or have been producing a companion podcast. So if you are interested in the concepts we’re discussing, Trent and I have gone through and deconstructed every single chapter of the book, talked to our author of the foreword, Brian Alexander, and really done a deep dive into each of these topics, as well as some that were left on the cutting room floor that we really wanted to be able to include but ran out of space and time.

Stephen Slota:
So if you’re interested, Please check out theworldbuildingworkshop.com we have a ton of free resources, videos, interviews, in addition to ways to access the book itself.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much. We are really grateful again for you coming on last minute. We’re wishing you both a happy holiday season. And this concludes actually our interview for season 11 and also our last interview of 2025. Next week we’ll be debriefing our final three interviews, followed by our scholarly recap of the entire season with our emerging scholar in residence, Jimmy Wilson. And in the meantime, we invite you to check out all of our episodes from this year and years prior on our website, fuelingcreativitypodcast.com and if you are someone who wants to share or have a conversation about creativity and education and be a guest on our show for 2026, please reach out to us at questionsouelingcreativitypodcast.com My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett  and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando and our editor is Sheikh Ahmed.