The last thing I'll say about interactivity is really looking at the games industry. So there are many books now on game design, many degree programs that exist around the country. Very, very effective programs to teach basic game design that create these engaging experiences. Now, of course, a lot of times games are built with entertainment in mind. But now we see games for change, we see games for health, we see, of course, games for learning. And so I won't go over all of this list, but I will tell you that looking at a game design book, Tracy Fullerton's, from USC, is an excellent one. Jesse Shell has an excellent book. These will help you understand how to craft experiences that matter and that draw people in. And you will sometimes hear the phrase gamification. It's not one that I use very often, but it is the, it shares a goal of creating a system of rewards, a system of feedback that manage that learner's, or that player's emotions from moment to moment. And again, it doesn't always have to be happy. Sometimes games can be very frustrating, and that can be to the game designer's benefit. So, really, in the end, what we're talking about is experience management. How can a system very carefully make changes that keep that player or learner engaged, interested, curious, spark future interest? And this is a picture of Minecraft, which I'm doing a lot of work now with Minecraft in teaching basic concepts of astronomy. What would happen if the world were different? If we had no Moon, the tides would change, and animal behaviors would be radically different. The atmosphere would change. So, I'm working with Neil Comins, at the University of Maine, a famous astronomer. And, thinking about not just telling kids about what the world could be like if there were different cosmic circumstances, but letting them actually experience it. And maybe even define it themselves, which is at the heart of Minecraft, which is modding, making the system what you want it to be. Okay, so, Our final category of orchestration tactics is to introduce narrative. And this is the oldest form, and I won't pretend to be a narrative scientist. But I will share a few examples with you, including the work of a good friend of mine. First thing I want to show you, though, is that narrative has a long history in museums. And, this is actually just an hour away in Springfield. My son and I, who, you could probably pick out my son from Lincoln's family there, we went to the Lincoln museum. I'd been as a kid. It's a fantastic museum. But you see, the Lincoln family as they are approaching the White House and so their three sons. What's great about the museum is, they have this traditional form of conveying Lincoln's story. But as you work around the museum, there are highly interactive, technology-driven exhibits that really augment the story. They don't overpower or distract you, they really do complement Lincoln's amazing life, and help you come to understand him better. Now, Ada and Grace, I'll go back to them. Ada and Grace were actually not just characters that we created to talk to you. A long process went in to defining their personalities, their history. So they are not just, look the same, they actually can tell you who was born first. They argue about it. They have different interests and when you ask who are your, do you have a boyfriend? They will tell you they have different interests. One is very interested in, she wants a guy who is involved in amino acid sequences, and the other just wants one who's thoughtful and kind. And so, they bicker, like twins do. They can tell you when they were born, when they were compiled, at USC and then copied over to Boston. So, the point of all this is, when you create a character like this, it's not just enough to write what they will say. But to think thoroughly through, where they come from, why they're there, what they like, what they don't like, and to give them background. And that is the story, that's the role of narrative. So, pushing it even further. If we think about the twins and Lincoln, wouldn't it be amazing to actually go talk to Lincoln and ask him the questions personally rather than be told them? So that's the vision and creating interactive historical characters is a part of the work at USC as well. So, moving on to now, Star Trek The Next Generation, one of my favorite shows growing up. You may recognize where Commander Riker is in this scene. He's in the holodeck, a completely fabricated world in a large room, digitally recreated, but tangible and interactive. And so what they do on Star Trek was use the holodeck for training, for vacation. Sometimes to recreate historical scenes, as a way to teach and learn from them. So, this has been the inspiration for so much educational technology. And what you'll notice when you watch the show is that it's not just the fact that you could do all of this, that you could recreate these scenes. But it was very interactive. So it was all story-driven, and that really sends the signal of, it's not really the technology. It's the story. It's the experience, and Star Trek did a wonderful job of communicating that, that important idea that is often lost. If you've seen, most people have an opinion on a terrible movie that had really good special effects, and so this is the exact situation. Those special effects can only take you so far. They can't make up for a weak story, and that's true for educational content, too. And so, stepping back now to more current work rather than the fictional future like Star Trek. I want us refer to work from a former colleague of mine from USC. Mark Riedl at Georgia Tech. And Mark works in something called Automated Storage Directing, also known as interactive storytelling. And what this is is, it's a way to tell stories, that, think of choose your own adventure, but on steroids. With heavy-duty AI planning machinery behind the scenes that can do. This is a snapshot from one of Mark's talks. That can allow you to go in and change the story by taking actions. And then the system can re-adapt, create new branches for you, even, is his latest work. And work your way through a story. And if you ruin the story, and if you look at some of these very carefully, you can see there are plans in place in case terrible things happen in the story. If you ruin the storyline right away, the system adapts and restructures it all. And that's the idea, is that you're going and you might break the story but the system can fix it and put you back on a narrative path. So these interactive storytelling systems are very powerful and hold amazing potential to communicate stories, communicate lessons learned, and actually, if you ever did a choose your own adventure, you probably have kept your thumb on an earlier page. I made the wrong call. I'm going back. I certainly did that. But that's learning, right? You made the wrong choice. Okay, here's why. I'm going to go back and try a different choice. So Mark's work is like that, but very much beyond branching storylines. As I wrap up, I want to leave you with this reminder that when we do all of this orchestration, when we think about these ideal learner states, the ultimate idea is to think about what's going to last. And so, it's always important to think about what that original definition of orchestration said. What are your desired effects? What are you hoping to achieve? The National Science Foundation here in the U.S. likes to talk about an informal learning awareness, gaining knowledge. Maybe not as deep a knowledge that you can get from say, an eight hour schoolday, but you can still certainly gain knowledge in a short visit to a museum. Creating interest, looking at behavior change. If you do an exhibit on health and dietary behaviors, maybe you can trigger something that improves the choices people make in terms of diet and exercise. Do you want them to care about a problem? Do you want them to go pursue more knowledge later? So these are all very important goals that informal educators seek. And I would argue that formal educators seek as well. With teachers inventing all sorts of novel ways to teach subjects. It's often in service of interest or creating motivation and inspiration to pursue knowledge later. I also want to cite research from a completely different field as evidence for why emotions really matter in learning. There's something in behavioral economics called the peak end rule and it's a very simple idea. It's that when you have an experience, it is, there are two things that really lead to long-term memory of it, and especially long-term positive memory of it. It is, say it's a painful experience, you will remember, it's a combination of the highest point of pain combined with the last bit of time. So, if you have something that's very painful, but you add a few seconds or maybe a minute of non-painful experience at the end, you will remember it as being less painful overall. The peak end rule. And so, if we think about that as educators, if we want to end an educational experience on a really positive note, that could have a profound impact on how learning, cumulative effect over time. If your learning always ends on a positive, this is the sort of things museums can do, they can bring in a lot of positive emotions to learning, which we hope would bleed over into formal institutions as well. The second thing I want to point out is this idea of challenge and difficulty. There's amazing basic research on learning and memory attributed to Bob Bjork at the University of California, Los Angeles. And Elizabeth Bjork and many others who have looked at this idea of a desirable difficulty. So, these are the things that make learning harder. And so, our instincts as independent learners are often to not seek out difficulty, but rather to seek out performance. So we want to feel like we're successful. So if you're a tennis player, you might just stand at one spot and hit forehand after forehand. And you start to see that you're getting better. It's actually better for you to run around the court, hit back hands, forehands, volleys, overheads. Now, your performance won't be as good, you'll make more errors, but that difficulty, introducing those challenges, leads to longer and better retention of those skills. And that has been tested across the board in cognitive and motor skills. And so museums, and any educational situation, frankly, can leverage these ideas to really have that lasting impact. So I'll leave you with this one, almost shocking, fact that, in the United States there are more museums, than Starbucks and McDonalds combined. This is a Washington Post article, you can check it yourself. But, when we think about that fact, and we think about how these are institutions that are there purely to help us learn. We should be inspired ourselves to go to them, and to go look at them critically, but also positively, and thinking about the impact they're having on society. Hopefully our friend leaves that museum happy. This is the Indianapolis Children Museum, one of my favorite places on earth. And these ideas can combine together, and I think. The way I think about technology and I hope that I've convinced you to think about it is, it can really amplify and improve everything we do already, and everything humans are good at, but we just have to do it right.
