Should Schools Teach Gaming? | A Conversation with Dr. Khizer Khaderi & Dr. Steffen Sommer

when little children start crawling around, what do they do? They open every drawer, they tip everything over. Not because they want to be annoying, no, because they're naturally wired to find out about world. What happens if? And we must not unteach this. We must make sure that

our curriculum is aligned with that and encourages students to think divergently rather than discouraging them. And that will keep that innovative power, which actually we all have in us naturally from Earth. We just don't use it and teach it out of our kids by telling them how to think, how to learn, and how to solve equations. Hey, Luan, I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome

to Education Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. As an organisational coach, I've helped thousands of leaders worldwide lead with greater confidence, make better decisions, and create winning teams. And on this show, we explore the strategies that are going to help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership. Now, before we jump into this conversation, I'm really excited. This episode is supported by the International

Curriculum Association. Stay tuned to learn more. Now, I have got two guests today. They are Dr.

Kaiser Kadari and Dr. Stefan Sommer. Kaiser is a clinical associate professor at Stanford University, he's the founding director of the Stanford Human Perception Laboratory and the Stanford Vision Performance Centre. He's also faculty at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI.

And Stefan, well, he's the director general at MISC schools in Saudi Arabia. That's the Crown Princess School there. He's got a lot of experiences, senior education across Europe and the Middle East. And what's interesting is these two have formed a fascinating partnership, looking at how gaming can really transform education in Saudi Arabia where, believe it or not, 89% of the population plays games and around two thirds are under 35. As a result,

they're looking at approaches that meet students in their digital world rather than drag in and back to hours. And this conversation really challenged everything I thought I knew about games in schools to less jointly. You might or you might not know, but Saudi Arabia has a large proportion of its population that are active gamers. In fact, a very large percentage of the Saudis are gaming. Therefore, it being or us being the Crown Princess School, it shouldn't be a surprise

that of course we have a gaming suite here. And we are a very high performing school. We have the most able students in the Kingdom. It's very difficult to get access to the school.

The entrance exams are stiff. And of course the gaming suite is not only there for gaming. In fact, I'd be mortified if the students spent all their time just gaming. So we phrase it a bit differently.

It needs to be gaming for a purpose. And that purpose can be relaxation. That purpose can be fun. That purpose can be because I'm interested in racing. I'm interested in basketball or

whatever it is. But the reason must also be others. So games that we would use in the gaming suite have to have an educational slant. So there have to be things that students learn while gaming.

And that's really how the relationship with Dr. Hisser came about. It was fortuitous, but we're working very closely with Stanford University on that because we just found each other and realized actually there's substantial research going on at Stanford when it comes to human perception and how things work. And that's why we are now in a very fruitful symbiosis, which actually goes far beyond gaming. But that's how it started.

I love that. I love that you found each other as well. So tell me a bit more about that, Kai. How did this happen and what are you up to?

Yeah, so I mean, it was very serendipitous, as Dr. Stefan has mentioned. That's kind of where opportunity and preparation kind of meet, where you're just kind of like, and then destiny has its role in it. But being able to be in a school, and we kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, is the concept of just to think differently. That term has been used quite a bit.

I mean, Steve Jobs, I think, did the best in terms of coining that. And when you think differently, when you think out of the box, when you are divergent in your thinking process, that's where a lot of innovation happens. And when people think about education, they don't really think about innovation. But to be honest with you, that is the bedrock, is what you learn as a child will help influence your outlook and your motivation, your internal drive and purpose, if they have the tools around them to be able to take whatever is within them from a purpose standpoint and fulfill that in terms of impact to society. And it comes from the most interesting places. When I kind of think about

this journey and how Dr. Stefan and I met, and even prior to that, in terms of just education, we've been educating ourselves our lives. And we don't even really realize it. I mean, there's that term, edutainment. When you think about Disney, they're probably one of the best

in that. I don't know whether you like that term or not. Dr. Stefan kind of gave a little smirk that could have been good. And when I look back at my childhood, I watched a lot

of cartoons. I watched a ton, much to the chagrin of my parents. But when I think about geometry, I'll remember when I think it was Donald Duck or Scrooge McDuck, someone was like, they're playing billiards and showing geometry, but it was a cartoon. I was watching cartoon, and they happened to be talking about geometry in the cartoon. And I just picked it up because

I like Donald Duck or whoever was involved with it. And I, you know, same thing with learning about classical music and Looney Tunes and opera. You know, at some point, I even have this written down in my notes, I want to write like all the things I've learned from cartoons and stuff, because, you know, people will say like the first mobile phone, you think about Star Trek. I remember it from, you know, I used to watch old cartoons like Johnny Quest. And if you look at the very first episode of Johnny Quest,

within the first five minutes, you'll see what looks like a mixture of the iPhone and the Blackberry kind of put together. It's what race Bannon is talking to Dr. Quest. So you see the sad part about this, I know these things very specifically, but I use these as part of educating my students is that you can learn from the most interesting places. And when you think about that, that's entertainment. When you think about gaming,

gaming historically has been something that's been viewed as just purely entertainment. And people want to take some of the tools related to gaming, and gamify education, gamify healthcare, gamify this and that gamification is a terrible thing. That's like almost trying to trick somebody into something. I like to say it's like putting the broccoli in the dessert, just so they eat their vegetables, right? That's not human nature. But being able to do it passively,

where you're going to meet the people where they're at, that's important, and especially in today's age. So as you've seen, gaming has started to evolve, it started to evolve into sport. As Dr. Seven mentioned, in Saudi Arabia, 89% of the population plays games, roughly about 70% of the population is under 35. So you have multiple generations within that game,

pretty much their whole lives. So when you think about how that's a powerful tool, not just for entertainment, but for sport, why can't that same tool be used just naturally as a form of passive learning, which is kind of what I think Dr. Stephan had mentioned a little bit about car racing and physics. I'll let him kind of describe it more, but that's kind of how we met, was very much being divergent thinkers and kindred spirits. We were set up as an elite

school here in Saudi to educate leaders for Saudi Arabia's future, for the Vision 2030 and beyond. And we teach in English, but we only have Saudis here, and they are exceptionally able Saudis. And for those, innovation is very important. For the Vision 2030, innovation is important, it is part of the human capital initiative, which is pillar three of the Vision 2030, that we felt being the Crown Prince of School and being exceptionally generously funded by him, we owe him that, that these students are not only capable future leaders who are capable of communicating with the intellect in English and in Arabic, who are well-versed in the world, who are global thinkers, and who are critical thinkers as well, but also innovators. And

that is, of course, what the country now needs. The country is on a journey, and in fact, if you live here, it's almost like we are on a bullet train. When you're out of the country for a week, you get nervous, you know, whereas the train gone in the meantime, it's really quite extraordinary. There's some major change every day. And that's, of course, the society

in which our children here, the students that we have in school, have to be leaders. So, innovation is a very important aspect. So, I have to think very deeply about the aspect of motivation as well. And motivation has become a big problem, that youngsters, particularly teenagers, are more and more difficult to motivate. But actually, the reason is quite simple,

because predominantly, we're teaching children still in the way we think they ought to be taught or to learn, when in fact, the children live in a digital world. They have developed their own ways of learning, but that is not what they recognize in the daily teaching. So, we as the teaching community worldwide have to adapt. We have to teach the children in the way they want to learn. And that is a very different concept. While we know, and I'm not

taking that away, while we tend to know what they need to learn, that's fine, there's a curriculum, there are exams and all that kind of thing. But we're actually putting everything to a test, including the examination system. We've got our own diploma, which is not for this podcast to talk about, that's a minor story, but we are the only school in the world that has its own diploma, which is recognized, it's been validated by Cambridge University, it's recognized as a qualification, it can be offered by other schools, and many schools here in Saudi have already expressed an interest in offering it, because it teaches skills, as a matter of course, that students in the 21st century need that prepares them well for university courses and for the job market, much better than what standard education does. And this all is tied in, we're working with examination boards now, because if they change their expectations for examinations, if they include critical thinking to a larger extent, if all their exams are interdisciplinary, which is actually what we do, what the students have to do when they get into the workplace or when they get to university, nobody does mathematics in the workplace for the sake of solving a mathematical equation. We all do mathematics in lots of different

ways, but for a reason, as part of a project, as part of a job, embed it in something else, while doing art, while doing design, while doing physics, while doing something else, but that's actually not taught. But we're working with examination boards to make sure they understand, and that understanding has now sunken in. Also teamwork, there's no reason why aren't we examining teamwork, why aren't there examinations where children are, as a matter of course, put together in random teams and have to work together to come to a project and that is then assessed by an examination board. That's not being done, but those are skills that are needed.

And that's why gaming became such an important aspect and the children are taking well to it, because they like the fact that we are even thinking about that they should learn the way they want to learn, rather than the way we think they ought to learn. This is very interesting to me, and you've hit upon something that I think many listeners will have probably been thinking. So initially you were talking about it kind of being a motivational tool, gaming, you know, they're games. But what you started to speak to at the end there was that it's more than that. It's about the way people in the 21st century

think and learn. So I'd love to explore a little bit about that. So aside from being a motivational tool, we know people like games. Have you found there's other things around gaming that are actually really supporting learning? Well, I'll leave that to Dr. Heiser, but there

is a lot. For instance, we can collect data about their health. In fact, they can train certain aspects of the brain, which helps them for other games, helps them in a particular game that they're playing, but also with other games, but I'll leave that to Dr. Heiser to explain.

Because it's fascinating. And our children are exceptionally fascinated by this, that they can actually take an active part in training their brains in order to learn in a certain way while gaming. Yeah, no, I mean, to go along with what Dr. Stephan, I think he just gave me the baton. So on this topic is question, you know, gaming

has been around for quite some time and even in the education space. And I'm going to be dating myself by stating this. But, you know, the very first game that, you know, as a child, I thought was slightly different than like Pong and Pac-Man and things like that was a game called Mule. It's an acronym M-U-L-E. And really, it was extraplanetary. And you learn about supply

chain, you learn about like you have this planet, and you had precious ore, and you had these mules, they look like camels that would be part of the supply chain and stuff. And you had to manage all of these things and your economy, while also trading with other economies and all this other stuff. But it was done in a way where it was, you know, we didn't know anything other than we were playing a game. I was doing this with my neighbor. So it was like my elder brother and my

neighbor, and there's three of us. And we were all kind of competing with our different precious resources and all this. And we play this after school. And then in like elementary school, we started actually, it didn't happen often. But I have to give credit to the school district I

was in. And there's multiple school districts around the United States that did it. But there was a game called Oregon Trail. And I actually have Oregon Trail, I have an unopened like version of it on my arcade, because it was very influential, you're basically pioneers going from the east coast of the United States to the west coast. And it's how do you keep your

group of pioneers safe? Like if something breaks down, how do you fix it like with a wagon, like making sure no one dies of dysentery, you know, making sure you have clean potable water, like there's all these things, you didn't realize that you were just happy that you got part of your period, I forgot what class period it was, you went to the library, and you were like playing a game, but you were actually learning quite a bit along with that. And so that kind of I think opened the door to a lot of research in this space around learning through gaming. And you know, some of the early were Daphne Babelier, she was at the University of Rochester. And she

was kind of one of the early ones, I think this was in 2003, that was doing a lot of research in this space. And there's actually a lot of psychologists. So I mean, I've run the human perception lab at Stanford. And, you know, it has a lot to do with how we perceive the world informs our decision making, which informs our actions, right. And when you think about a

lot that happens with your senses, and we think about vision scientists or scientists that are in any of the senses in auditory like science, or in gustatory, like with taste or old factory, in terms of smell, they all have a psychology background. And the reason why I kind of make that point is so much of our brain is tied to how we perceive. And when you think about gaming, a lot of it has to do with like visual perception, and how you're taking in different types of information, it could be multitasking, multiple different types of responsibilities or actions, how you're able to effectively make a decision, act on something, don't act on another thing. And different games provide different scenarios for you to do that. Something that's a strategic

puzzle game is going to be very different than one that's a little bit more independent versus one that's more related to a team approach. It's kind of like when you think about sports, we've had sports and school systems for quite some time, right? I don't know exactly what year that started. But that's even how the Ivy League was put together, it was through sport. And you

learned a lot about education through just how you work with each other, discipline of just a routine of training, of learning, and now it's become more and more mathematical, there's more data behind it. If you think about sports, it's evolved, right? So when you think about gaming, I would think about it in a similar way. It's something that's still relatively in its infancy, but you can learn a lot of my students, at least at the graduate level, and some came out to miss schools to meet the students and were blown away by their level of sophistication. Some of the kids that they talked to had been in the world robotics and

so forth, but they shared one commonality, it wasn't just playing games, it's what they learned from games. One of my students learned about astrophysics from playing some video game, I can't recall the name of it. But he goes, my physics classes were so easy after I played this game, because I had to do a math problem to get to this next place, or I had to do this, and it was just a task that had to be completed as part of the gaming experience. I have a nephew that is at an Ivy League university, and he was one of the top players in Pokemon, the video game, worldwide. And I didn't know that it's a thing, but it's a thing.

And I asked him, I said, I'm like, tell me what happened to the rest of the folks in the top 10 from your Pokemon competitions? And he started listening, I'm like, where did they go to school? He listed almost every top school around. He's like, oh, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge. And he didn't see the pattern. He didn't know what I was asking. So when we look

at gaming as, oh, man, it's just a mind numbing experience, and they're not gaining anything out of it, I think a different way of looking at it is not looking at it as a tool just for entertainment, but it's a sport. There's certain things that you get from this, and from an education standpoint, and to what Dr. Stefan was saying, there's a pedagogy, and there's certain aspects that can be derived from it. And these are some of the things that we're also doing together. So we've actually created certain technologies that can measure

this as well, measure how you perceive, measure cognitive, so perception-based psychometrics, cognitive-based psychometrics, and motor-based psychometrics. So it's putting the science into that. And it's an exciting time, and being able to work with like-minded individuals to see that, hey, this potential, it's not just, I mean, we can give you all the stats. We give you the stats of Saudi Arabia. It's a young country. But when you think about whether it's a young country or an

old country or any country in between, 3.5 billion plus people play games, whether it's on mobile or whatever. So why wouldn't you look at this as the way forward with especially digital natives in terms of education? And so finding like-minded people to do that with has been serendipitous, as we've said at the top of this conversation. This episode is supported by the International

Curriculum Association. Now, I've been working with the ICA for quite a few years, but they've been around for 30 years. And they've been around championing quality, unlocking potential, and improving learning in international schools right around the world. I really, really love that at their core is a model for improving learning. And this model is focused on the learning

experience and they have tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources, and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours. So if you're interested, and I really do recommend you check them out, head over to internationalcurriculum.com. Are you predicting that gaming should be a part of the curriculum in the same light as PE? Do you see many schools in the future having gaming as a curriculum component?

Maybe that's what you're already doing. Yeah, if I can just give you a comment on that. It is the nature of innovation, isn't it? That the wheel of history is spinning relentlessly, and there's no way of stopping it. I know that

whole countries that don't like AI, because of the danger of cheating, have declared it illegal to use in schools. I think that's a very dangerous game, because technological progress will be happening. We as mankind have benefited immensely from the technology progress, otherwise we would still be living in caves. That is all progress. And throughout history,

if you research it, it has never been easy. Whenever somebody came up with a groundbreaking new idea, which could actually change a paradigm, we are difficult, because we love being used to things. And that's the way we're used to it. And that's the way we love doing it.

But we are playing a dangerous game with education, because we are a different space. We need to meet our kids in the places where they hang out. And I'm quoting Kaiser here. We use that phrase in our talk at the LEAP conference. And that is very true. And if we

don't, we're going to lose them. And we already have very clear signs that we're losing them. It is discipline in schools. Yes, there are some attempts in schools in the UK and elsewhere, where with draconian discipline, that can be maintained, and with restrictions and forbidding students to do this, that, and the next, that is possible, but only for a short period of time, unless we change the paradigm, and adapt to what the children want to do, and meet them in their spaces. Because we cannot have this dichotomy of us carrying on kind of

living in the 20th century, trying to drag our students back into the 20th century, when every day they're living their lives in the 21st century in the digital world. And more and more schools are doing that. I'm moving on to a slightly more expanding the topic a little bit here. We're moving into a space whereby the children are living in the virtual world. If you

look at the number of hours children spend on technology, we cannot ignore this. We cannot disallow children to use their phones. But in fact, we should stop teaching them things that they can look up on their phones within two seconds. Why are we wasting their time? Why are we doing

that? When we're not teaching them skills that they so desperately need in order to survive in this society, and in order to make sure that in the future, when they go to university and into the job market, they are prepared. For instance, Miss School is a very large school. We have three large libraries here. When I wrote my PhD, I had to take a trip to the library

and find the books that I needed to find and research that. And I knew when they were published, I knew at that time, that was the current knowledge. This is not what children do anymore. They've got the world's knowledge thrown at them left, right and center every day.

So just imagine the situation. They're walking into their rooms when they come back from school, and somebody has dumped books into that room from left, right and center. So it's full of books. So they come along with the assignment that they have to do, and they start looking for the right book. That's their reality, because they're not being taught how to find the right

information. And once they've found the book that says something about the topic that they need to research, they don't actually know if that's true. It might just have been some buffoon who came up with something and wrote that on some pages, because that's their reality. And now with the latest announcement from Zuckerberg and Co., we know that less and

less is being corroborated. Therefore, we don't teach children how to research the internet properly, how to make sure they use chat GBT properly, because it depends on your prompts, what you get out, and how to verify information. But that actually, in this day and age, is the most important thing the students need to do. I'm not denying that, of course, they need to learn how to read and write. But even that, we're spending a lot of time in

primary school to make sure they handwrite properly, they write cursively. When in fact, how often do we write cursively? I still wrote my PhD by hand and had it typed on a typewriter. But actually, nowadays, I find it difficult to write one page by hand, because I crab up, because actually, most of my writing is being done by typing, or more and more often nowadays, I just say it into my phone and it types for me. And that's the reality. So, you know,

there's a reason why we don't have looms at home anymore, which we used to in the 15th century, because we had to weave our own clothes, but now we go down the show and buy it. So why are we asking our children to learn stuff that clearly, clearly in this day and age, is not necessary anymore? Of course, handwriting is a great skill, and it will always remain a great skill. But it certainly will not have the importance that it used to have in the 20th century and before, because we've got other tools now, and it would be the midst of us to not acknowledge that. Some people say, why do we teach children? In fact, it was Konrad

Bolfram, one of the most famous mathematicians at the last Covis conference last year said, we should not teach children anything that they can look up on their phone within seconds. And that includes maths. Somebody in the audience said, well, that's not including the times tables. And he said something very interesting. It does, because actually,

we shouldn't be kidding ourselves. Seven-year-olds don't learn time tables. They might know the times tables, but they don't know the maths. They learn the repetition of three times three makes nine. And that is what they have in their brain. It's actually a memorizing exercise.

It's not understanding maths, because often when you put three sticks next to three sticks to three six, and you ask them how many sticks have you got there, they can't necessarily make that connection. So we have to concentrate on things that are actually important, not on things that they can look up using their technology that they've got available. And their motivation will rise automatically if we allow them to live in the world that they actually live in, that they experience every day and use the technology that they would naturally use at home. I think this is fascinating. I'm trying to think now, like,

there is a lot of resistance to this. And one thing that I hear is that you can't take all the knowledge out the curriculum just because it's available online and you can't remove all the knowledge because then students have nothing to think with. Do you get engaged in that conversation much? Of course, and nobody denies that, of course, they need to be taught the current knowledge, but they need to be taught the current knowledge differently. They need to be taught the current

knowledge under the proviso that actually the day after tomorrow might be wrong. So the notion of making a mistake, trying to find things out, coming back to what Heiser said at the beginning, divergent thinking is what we have successfully taught out of our students for almost two centuries. And the reason is quite simple, because we determined what they need to know, how they need to learn it, and how they need to think, and that they must not make a mistake. In fact, it's all these things. What we all have been given naturally, the gene that we want to

inquire, you know, when little children, three-year-olds or two-year-olds, when they start crawling around, what do they do? They open every drawer, they tip everything over, not because they want to be annoying, no, because they are naturally wired to find out about world, what happens if? And we must not unteach this. We must make sure that our curriculum is aligned with that and encourages students to think divergently, rather than discouraging them. And that will keep that

innovative power, which actually we all have in us naturally from Earth. We just don't use it and teach it out of our kids by telling them how to think, how to learn, and how to solve equations. Absolutely. So, for someone listening in and going, okay, I get it, but I'm a school leader, I've got a busy curriculum, where do you think you should start as a school leader, just to start thinking about moving your school forward with some of this thinking?

Yeah, there's a book that someone had given me, and Dr. Stefan knows this book, because I've mentioned it a few times. A really good friend of mine gave this to me, and it goes along the lines of being a divergent thinker. It's called Range by David Epstein, and it's how to be a generalist in a specialized world. And as Dr. Stefan has mentioned about

monolithic thinking in terms of traditional education and curriculum, and you do it this way and so forth, there's a lot to be said about cross-pollination. And I think as school leaders that are listening or watching, it's like, well, I'm actually a surgeon by background. I'm a neurophthalmic surgeon. And how did I get more into technology where I spend a lot more of my time thinking about spatial computing and AI and wearables and all these different technologies and buzzwords that are kind of quantum, they're kind of coming out, right?

And how am I discussing gaming and other things? I mean, I'm very comfortable talking about agricultural tech and the soil microbiome and the soil for crops and comparing it to the microbiome and the gut, because I can make those connections. And it's been by cross-pollinating. And a lot of that goes back to what Dr. Stefan had said about curiosity in kids. When they're

two, three years old, they're very curious of the world. And we've kind of taken the curiosity and choked it out of the room. We got rid of it as we go through the levels and the grades. And we don't even want to be what's curious about something that's doing something completely different and looking at the commonalities and how I can use that and how I can use that to inform my next decisions or how I think about the world, right? I mean, when you think about it,

we have this big binary problem in everything, whether it's ubiquitous in education and other areas. I mean, if I'm going to communicate with somebody in the digital space, it's a thumbs up, thumbs down, it's a heart, or it's not. Like, it's very binary in our approach, which isn't how humanity has been since the dawn of humankind, right? And I think that reminding yourself, so I think one thing for people, you know, they're educators, is to be open, to be curious as well as leaders of these schools and to kind of emulate what you're trying to get across in that way, because we are in a brave new world where everything's moving very quickly. I love the analogy Dr. Stefan gave.

Imagine a child that's going into a room that's constantly being filled with different books. I'm sure there's teachers, they're walking into their rooms going, what do I need? They're doing blocking, tackling my offensive and my defensive with my approach here. It's just being open. I think knowing that it's okay not to know everything, but to be willing to learn

and be curious on both sides of the desk, right, as a teacher and the student. Shane, you're asking a very interesting question and that is the essence of our relationship. I think a lot of good work is already taking place in schools because, for instance, heads and teachers have realised that interdisciplinary teaching is much more important than teaching subject-wise. But we are currently stuck with, at the most important years, for the four GCSE for 16 euros, but also for 18 euros at A level, because we are stuck with a curriculum that requires maths being examined, physics being examined and all that kind of thing. Which is why I formed that relationship and I think

what is very important is that more and more schools do that. And schools do form relationships with universities, but normally for one reason only, that is to get their kids into good universities. But that actually is an incidental reason. That might or might not happen. The

reason should really be to form a symbiosis with the universities. What do you need? What do you want from the kids when they enter your university? And that's what we will try. And

heads have a lot of flexibility. Heads can do an enormous amount. They can't change the exam system, that's true. But I come back to what I said earlier, the examination boards can.

And the examination boards are listening very closely to what schools are saying. People seem to be thinking it takes a government to change everything. No, it doesn't. It doesn't at all. Because the exams are done by examination boards. So if they change them, if they change

the slant of the examination boards and say, for instance, we focus on this, and there are already this disciplinary courses around. For instance, perspectives on science is already one of them, global perspectives offered by Cambridge is another one. There are those courses around. But interestingly enough, not very many universities actually accept them as bonafide courses. So they are still stuck in the 20th century. They want maths to be studied and

maths to be examined. They want physics to be studied and physics to be examined. Well, in fact, that is not what the workplace needs. And I can see why universities are saying that. They say, well, we do that bit. We do the bit where they then prepare for the workplace.

That's true. But they underestimate that schools are also there to prepare students directly for the workplace, because not everybody is going to university and then going to the workplace. It's that kind of thing. So there needs to be a much better understanding on the university part of what schools do. And that can only be done by forming close relationships,

which schools already have. But as I say, the focus tends to be, I want to get my kids into good universities, rather than having an understanding of how can we improve things for this generation, but also for future generations. And that's really what we're doing. And just as a last bit, from Heiser's lab, the human perception lab, Heiser, he started the discipline or he invented the discipline of symbiotics, which is the interface between the human brain and machines, really something that captures young kids' minds very, very quickly.

So what we've done is Heiser's been over here to Riyadh, and he taught that course to students, to grade 10, grade 11, grade 12, to see how they cope with this. And guess what? They cope exceptionally well. Reason being, they have divergent thinking. But you know, once you

are at university, and your thinking is run in, and your methodology is run in a particular way, you're kind of losing that a bit. I call it academic innocence, which children have, because they're not part of an academic system. So you get very wacky ideas. And what's interesting about wacky ideas, those who are experts, and say, well, actually, that's not that wacky after all, we might well do something with it. And that's really what we found when the Heiser and his team

taught this course here. This whole chart really got me thinking about how we define innovation in education. I think Heiser and Stefan, they aren't just thinking about adding games into a traditional teaching, but actually, how do they fundamentally rethink how learning happens in this digital age? The idea that we're still treating children the way we think they ought to learn rather than how they want to learn, that's an interesting idea. And when you

think about it, with 3.3 billion people playing games around the world, that's not a distraction to overcome. There's a medium there to embrace. I really like their point on motivation, too. We

often blame students for lack of engagement, perhaps, though we're asking students to live in two different worlds, a digital reality at home, and an analog reality at school. And how does that work together? In terms of practical advice, well, it all starts with curiosity, forming partnerships with universities, not just to get students in but to understand what skills they actually need. And mostly, meet students where they are, not where you think they should be. You can find out more about Heiser's work at Stanford Human Perception Lab,

and Stefan's great innovations at missed schools through the links in the show notes. Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Thanks so much to my show editor, Pete McGill, and for the original music by Guillermo Silva. And thank you so, so much for tuning in today.

It's been a pleasure to have you. And if we don't speak before, as ever, I'll see you here next week. If you want to learn more about the brilliant work from the International Curriculum Association, head to internationalcurriculum.com.