Can education be fun and games?
Luke Hohmann is Founder and CEO at FirstRoot, Inc. He is "an old school Silicon Valley entrepreneur" who instead of building companies to flip, builds companies that make the world better.
The key to his success? His ability to gamify serious subjects.
Luke will discuss how he brought these projects to life:
If Luke can make budgeting and government fun, he can definitely help you figure out how to gamify your own project. Don't miss the chance to pick his brain!
Can education be fun and games?
Luke Hohmann is Founder and CEO at FirstRoot, Inc. He is "an old school Silicon Valley entrepreneur" who instead of building companies to flip, builds companies that make the world better.
The key to his success? His ability to gamify serious subjects.
Luke will discuss how he brought these projects to life:
If Luke can make budgeting and government fun, he can definitely help you figure out how to gamify your own project. Don't miss the chance to pick his brain!
Good
Jackie Guzda:morning, everyone. And welcome to lifelong learners. Thank you for joining our community today, today, our special guest is Luke Holman. He is founder and CEO of first root Inc. He's an old school Silicon valley entrepreneur, who instead of building companies to flip. Build companies that make the world better. So welcome,
Luke Hohmann:Luke. Hi, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jackie Guzda:Yes. And also my cohost is Josh who is the senior advisor to click two. Good morning, Josh.
Luke Hohmann:Good morning to how are you today, Jackie?
Jackie Guzda:I am fantastic. So, so gentlemen, Luke is a very interesting. He says that that education can be fun and games. So I may ask you firsthand, is it?
Luke Hohmann:Well, it can be when you, when you, when you say is it, then the answer has to be no, cause it's not all fun and games. but can it be more engaging? Can it be more. impactful. Absolutely. So we should strive for that. We should say, okay, if I can be then in what situations can we maximize that? And could it always be that way that that would be the worthy goal to strive for? Can it always be more fun and more engaging? Hmm.
Jackie Guzda:So Luke, you, I think you really, truly believe in your heart and you have. Spawned innovations to make education fund. And I find because I'm a college professor in the classroom that once it's fun for a student, they want to engage. How'd you come to that point where you had that epiphany?
Luke Hohmann:The idea that there was a single epiphany. it it's kind of many times something like this builds over time. Right? And for me it wasn't, I would say a single epiphany. It was a set of accumulated experiences that allowed me to realize that, that there was this possibility for making things fun and engaging. And we even have to tease out the what we mean by the word fun. When we say the word fun. what do we mean? So I'll start with, with a more recent part of the history several years ago, when, we were at dinner one night, one of my children said, dad, how was your day? And I said, it was really good. I had a really good day at work today. And they said, did you have fun? And I realized that in that moment, My child's conception of fun and they were younger. They were probably seven or eight was very different. And I said, yes, I had fun. But then I realized what I meant was I had adult fun. So what is adult fun and what is learning fun? Well, learning fun means I'm engaged. It means I have an authentic question. It means that I have a project-based learning with a student generated outcome. I'm enabling my curiosity and fun is a relationship. so we think of, we think of, I can create fun in an absolute sense, but that's not true. That's like saying human. it's an absolute thing. It's not, it's it. You may find Jackie, you may find one joke funny at Josh and I kind of look at each other and go, why is she laughing at it? Right. and yeah, that was funny. And so what, one of the things that we have to realize is that we can create a context where there's a greater likelihood where more people will find something engaging. And fun, but it not, everyone will find it engaging and fun. And it turns out that humans have been doing this for as long as there's been recorded history and that's through the notion of play and all higher order species play and games. And so, you know, one of the standard misconceptions about hunting, for example, animals are playing to teach hunting skills. No, they're not. Animals are playing because they're deriving pleasure from. Just like humans do. And, so w when you see like tiger Cubs playing, they're playing, they're having a good time. and so for an educator, the question becomes, well, what is the secret key that can unlock the idea that. We can create more engaging experiences, more fun and air quotes, but more fun experiences. And it turns out we have the key right in front of us. We've known it forever. We just don't apply it. And that key is a game. So when we create learning experiences and use game techniques to create a form of a game or a game itself, we come out of that. And I'll pause for a sec, but we will need to define what we mean by a game. The difference kinds of games that exist in the difference between say gamification and a game itself. But, but the root is if I want to make learning more fun, then I am creating a environment and a context in which there's a relationship that allows me to be engaged and have fun. Jackie before we, before we go any further, can we maybe play a game where has lukewarm? Because, you know, I think, I've known Luke now for, for a while. And I find something new about him all the time, where he's worked, where he's lived. And I think for, you know, and I always come, you know, from the entrepreneur side of things here, you know, The tear about the entrepreneur. So we could play a game. Where has Luke worked in what continent? You know, he's the father of what, you know. So can we hear a little bit about, his travels? Sure. It's funny, Josh, you know, me a well enough now and, and for the listeners, Josh, Josh and I are working together on a couple of different endeavors. And, he knows that sometimes they feel a little awkward talking about myself like that because I'm a future oriented person. And I think our past is something that gives us a foundation, but it doesn't. you should never let your past to find you, it can inform you and it can give you a foundation. but where is Luke worked? Well, I'll take that as a few companies. I started working for a few smaller companies doing programming and, and other kinds of things. I date myself when I say I, I actually programmed on a TRS model. radio shack, computer in basic building, vocational educational software tracking for Michigan. then I went into a couple of other companies and I landed my first, I would say kind of real job at electronic data systems. I worked at EDS for 10 years. I started. Humbly in large data centers. There's, people who cable the computers. So when you see those pictures of computers on TV, about data centers and you see all those neat wires, you have to wonder, well, where do those wires go? Well, they drop down into the floor and they are routed through the floor. And it, the, the forest called raised floor because there's a, there's a, there's a. Samantha foundation. And then there's flooring. I was a floor grub and a floor grub is a person who goes underneath the Florida cable up the computers. So most people say they can. They say they work their way from the ground up. I could say that I truly worked my way from the ground up. spent 10 years at EDS. It was fantastic. It was amazing. the company was just wonderful. and about lifelong learning. And I love the lifelong learning of this podcast because one of the lifelong learning lessons was as I spent 10 years at EDS, but I had 10 different jobs, at least I, because they allowed me to move around. So if a young person is going to take a company, a job at a big company, they should use it as a lifelong learning experience. What are you learning? How are you growing? What are you doing? To advance your career from EDS. I went to my first startup and, that was in Dallas, a company called object space where I ran the training division. So I've spent a lot of time building, educational, courseware and materials for adults. My, my background is really teaching adults. I've stopped counting at 25,000 adults. The number of adult adults who have been in, teaching, over my career. So it's a lot, from object space, I moved to the bay area. To join my first, bay area startup, a company called origin systems. We built the world's first data warehouse for patent data. So as the head of engineering and product management there, from there, I started my own company. It failed, so, okay. Yeah, we've all had that happen. That's okay. Lots of learning there. then I, went to work for a turnaround. I was given the responsibility of turning around, an organization, previous systems. We sold that to an Israeli company, a Latin knowledge systems. It was a lot of fun. Worked for an Israeli security firm for a few years, learned a lot, again, in, in that job. And then I started on my own in 2003, I started a consulting firm. I split that and I had a software firm continuous. that I split out of the consulting firm. The consulting firm, is, being run by a different person. That's doing fine. that company is applied frameworks. the other company continue, I sold in 2019 completed my integration tasks and 2020 and started first fruit and 2020 of course, starting a company in the height of the pandemic. and I started it partly because of. we were seeing the rise of participatory budgeting, which is a democratic process and which students are given real money to invest in their school. we saw the continued rise of PV and schools take. A very dramatic negative turn because of COVID you couldn't do participatory budgeting in person. And I wanted to fix that. I wanted to make sure that we could still do participatory budgeting in schools. So I started a new software company to, to do that. And that's the focus of first group. I see along the way, and you will both appreciate this. I picked up a bachelor's and master's degree. Michigan when I was working for EDS and I worked for Elliot Solloway, who is a well-known education researcher at university of Michigan. And my research was I studied how expert programs, programmed, and I built a learning environment and a curriculum that taught. Novice programmers, the techniques of expert programmers, and it was dramatically successful. It appended all of the ways in which we were teaching traditional programming, to teach it the way that experts actually do it. And, we were seeing, the dramatic increases in, in, in performance in our students. So I have a background in pedagogy and students and, and teaching that I carry forward to this day.
Jackie Guzda:Wow. I mean, participatory budgeting sounds like a mind blowing concept. I want to hear more about that. And I also want to hear from our audience out there, how many of you have started your business and failed? I mean, just like Luke Hab, how many of you have gone through all those stairsteps on building your career? How many of you have questions? To ask Luke where he can give you all the breadth of his experience to maybe help you with your projects. So put it in the chat. I want to know let's pick his brain. So tell us a little more, what is, what is participatory, budgeting all about
Luke Hohmann:Luke? Yeah, one of the, so this is part of the history and, and Josh, I hope I answered the question reasonably well or hit the right one at the right depth, their level. It was, I mean, it was, it was amazing. Honestly, it's fascinating to hear and we truly could probably make a game out of that, but we discuss that offline. so Jackie is a major part of my life. And some of the listeners who are here are agile software developers, and there's a movement in the software development community that started a long time ago. It started 20 years ago, agile software development, and it's a different way to build software than the traditional way that we were taught. The traditional approach to software was something called waterfall. You define your requirements, you design your software, you build it. And everyone's happy. It's not like that. Because software development is itself. A creative process. that requires interaction and feedback from users. It's hard to predict What you want until you see it, because we know from the work of organizational behavior and cognitive psychology that sense-making and understanding as a retrospective activity, Carl White, one of the people I was able to study with at Michigan has a famous phrase. How do I know what I mean until I hear what I say? And his point. I know Josh has a, it's a mind bender. How do I know what I mean until I hear what I say, meaning sense, making occurs as a retrospective activity, something happened. How do I make sense of it? How do I bring that into my world? And the reason that this is important is because when you're building software, You can define your requirements and then build it. Or you could build a, a user interface prototype and test it and get some feedback. And this notion of small iterative cycles that, that create learning. Is the foundation of the lean startup movement. It's the foundation of all of design thinking. It's the foundation of what we know. And I was blessed to be an early leader in that world. I helped form the first agile conference in 2003. I've served on the board of the agile Alliance, which is the largest organization devoted to agile software developer. I ran the world's largest webinar about collaboration for the scrum Alliance. And I sold continue to the scaled agile framework, which are scaled agile, which has produced the scaled agile framework, which is the most broadly and widely adopted framework for agile software development in the world. Your educator said, you'll, you'll appreciate this number. There's more than 1 million people around the world. Who've been trained in the scale of agile. framework That's a big number for a profession, a professional development framework. Okay. So in agile and I'm trying to figure out how do we better understand users How do we better understand your needs? Jackie? Let's say you're the CEO of a trucking company, and you've got a bunch of truckers who work for you, and you're trying to manage your routes and your logistics. And you've got trucks and you've got COVID. How do we help you solve your needs through better routing software, better truck management, software, better drivers scheduling software, better customer ordering software. We, we have a lot of software that helps you run your trucking business. Well, it turns out that the traditional forms of market research are pretty garbage. And what I mean by that is, is surveys. I have this great phrase, surveys suck, and okay, now they don't really suck, but most of the times they really suck. And the reason they suck is because when you take a survey, the very first thing that goes through your mind is how do I want to answer this? survey What, what role do I want to have? Do I feel charitable? And I actually am going to answer the survey in a way that's authentic, Josh, you're laughing, but you know, I am going to use that quote very quickly, you know, just not to interrupt, but, you know, having worked with a lot of schools and PTA's a lot of the PTA say, can we run a survey? And I'm like, we can run a survey, but here's the. You and my team and your team, we really know probably a good way to get going, but let's do some surveys. And, and I've, I have found, to quote somebody I know very well survey SOC well it's because the, the first thing that happens is you, as a survey, respondent are running through your head. How do I want to answer? What, what role am I going to play in that survey? What role do I take? Do I, do I take an authentic role or am I just going to, like, I don't care. They're paying me or I'm going to mess with them. I'm going to answer it a completely different way just to have fun. And so I got 14, 15 seconds booboo. Okay. Pop up my phone, blah, blah, blah. Here's fine. You got your survey. So, so the what my insight Jackie was. I wanted to find a mechanism for market research that created more authentic responses and it turns out. that The most authentic behavior that exists within humans is when you're playing a game. Because when you're playing a game, your desire to win the game, to achieve the goal, overpowers, all the other stuff that you may or may want to do. So taking a step back a game is a human construction in which we have, a few main elements. There's a goal, something to. There's a mental or physical space to that are, that is given in order to achieve the goal. There's a set of resources that we use to achieve the goal. There's a set of rules that govern our interaction. There's a mechanism of feedback. It ma in most games, that's a way to keep score. And then the most important part of a game is that there's a set of players who voluntarily choose. To try to achieve the goal with the resources given meaning, on this side of the line, I'm a perfectly rational person who can pick up a ball with their hands. I crossed the line and I become an irrational person who chooses to only kick a ball. And I have a game called soccer on, on this side of the, the, the cement path. I am a perfectly rational person who, if I wanted to put a little ball into a cup, I would just go drop it in with my hand and get it right. Every time I crossed the asphalt path and I pay a lot of money to do it. And I decided that the only way I'm going to get the white ball in the cup is do whack it with us. Yeah, and I, I create costs. It's like a game I'm like, what game, what game are we talking about? It's a Medigap game right now. Well, but what's interesting is, is humans are so intrinsically playful that we will invent games just to have an experience of making something challenging. So, so we, we create games and games are tuned over time. How, why is the soccer field, you know, if I, if we were playing soccer, you know, American version of European football, right. But if we were playing soccer, Josh I'll do a little Q and a with you. If the soccer field was 500 yards long with the game before. I mean, you're like a professional athlete too, probably for you, but not for me, but for most people. How about the spectators? What a 500 dared field be an interesting game to watch? No, no, it's too far. Now, if the soccer field was 20 yards long with 22 people on it, would it be fun? No, it's too crowded. That might be beat each other up. So it might be a little bit fun. The answer is no, but yeah, but the answer is no. Right. And so what happens is this is as humans kind of, and notice that I included spectators as part of the game, because we get that energy from the crowd. So now we then look at the construct of a game and we can say, well, what kind of games exist? Well, there's entertaining games. Like Scrabble and, shoots and ladders. And then there's serious games. And a serious game is a game in which the outcome materially matters to the, producers, the people who invoked to play or the participants or both. So now we can look at well, what games do you find fun? Because the game isn't fun, a game has a relationship to its players. So as a parent, When my kids were young, we played chutes and ladders or snakes and ladders, depending on the country. That game is no longer. fun Because there's very little strategy. You roll the thing you move, right. But you're teaching your child very fundamental elements of future gameplay. Turn-taking, winning, losing chance, the role of randomness with the role of not randomness. What, what does it mean to cheat when you move, when you move the spinner to a number? So the child wins, et cetera, but eventually. That game becomes boring. And the one of the, one of the great game theorists is Jane McGonigal. And in her book, reality is broken. She talks about, we play a game until it becomes boring and the best games, the games that we Revere, if you will have stayed interesting for years and years and years, my wife and I literally play Scrabble probably once a month with net we've roped into some of our, we played Scrabble two weeks ago with my daughter and a friend, Kyle, who, whose wife. Traveling. So he's like, Hey, I'm lonely. And we're like, come on over and play games. We'll play Scrabble. We'll play Euchre. So we play Scrabble. We play Euchre for those of you who don't know what Euchre is, it's a card game. That's a thin vehicle for drinking. It's awesome. you should look it up and play it at our attention. Yeah. So, so now we play games until they're boring and now we can now move into the last part of games. In game theory, there's two kinds of games, finite games and infinite games. And this is from the work of the philosopher, James Carse and James pot points out that most games are finite. There's a winner. There's a loser. There's either a time limit. Although if you have tennis or baseball, there's no time limit, but there's, there's a notion of finiteness to the game. An infinite game is a game we play to perpetuate. So in a finite game, if you play well, you win in an infinite game. If you play well, you get to play more. Let me give you an example, Josh. I got to go with jazz cause he's my he's my buddy here. That's good. Josh, did you win the marriage game yesterday? Which facet of it? See, see, he doesn't know how to answer the question because in reality. Winning the marriage game merely means that you get to play again. It's an infinite game. Every play the marriage game. Well today I get the right to play the marriage game again tomorrow. How about parenting? Josh? Did you win the dad game yesterday? My wife and my daughter are over there to play another day. You're right. You get to play another day. I don't want to be morbid, but I have to be kind of full circle. We keep playing the marriage game until it becomes boring. And when the marriage game becomes boring, what happens? The game is over the game is over. We get a divorce. Right. And so when, when you say lifelong learning, which, which is just such a brilliant name for a show, you cannot have a better name than lifelong learning because what we know about finite games and serious games is that you can play a finite game in the context of a serious game, because it can advance and perpetuate play. So, John. And I, or Jackie, you might take a vacation with your family. That vacation is a finite game. It has a start and an end, and it has a certain set of interactions, but are perpetuate. The infinite game because of vacation with your family is a chance to recharge. It's a fence. It's a chance to share love. It's a chance to spend time together just like Jenna and I play Scrabble. I mean, we don't, I mean, why do we play Scrabble? It's because we want to be together. We want to have that opportunity to be together and not stress about the kids. Not stress about finances, not stress about our house. We have time together. Now I take that philosophy into agile software development and into product development. Every release of my software is in my mind, a move in the infinite game. It's it's a finite thing, right? Start to end. I ship my software. That's designed to advance my relationship with my customer. Schools and school districts and PTA's and other entities who, who get our software. I'm advancing my relation to it with them because once you know Josh and, and when, when we land a school, how long do you think I want the school as a customer til next year or forever infinitely infinitely. Unless I become bored with playing the game. So you see the boringness to me, I have a really different conception of the stock. IBM was in the spot in the personal computer business until it became boring for them in air quotes. And so they sold it to Lenovo because Lenovo wanted to play that game. And because the Lenovo wanted to play the game, they're playing it better than IBM did. And Lenovo is right at creating great computers. And that's the last part about a game? A game has voluntary participants. If it's a true game, I choose to. No, one's forcing me to play scramble. Look, we've got
Jackie Guzda:a question from Josh SAIS, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. And he says, based on your prior experience, do you, what do you think are the best requirements for a game to be interesting and entertaining for students?
Luke Hohmann:Well, the first part of a game is a goal that's worthy of achieving and. The goal in soccer, of course, is score more points. And, and how do I score more points? I kick the ball in the net. So I think what we have in, in students, and this is very, very tricky. This is very, very tricky in the current educational system, because the goals that are established are not given by the students they're created by. administrators and politicians, and I'm not, that's not an, that's not a negative statement. There are reasons that we want to have language standards, right. There are, there are reasons we want to have math standards, and meaning there's there. There's reasons why these standards exist. the common core and, language standards, the challenges is how do we, how do we have the standard and how do we have a goal that allows people to realize those for me, I'm a fan of project-based learning. I'm a fan of authentic questions and I'm a fan of student-generated outcomes. So, so there's no universal answer to this. Although I do think that we're finding more resources available for educators that are in alignment with that philosophy that gives you more options. And, and what I would say to, to Josh or Joe is to experiment. because we, as I said earlier, we know that some games are more likely to be enjoyable. Meaning Scrabble has a lot of people who play Scrabble, but not everyone likes. Scrabble So, so you, you're not going to get a perfect match every time, but if you can create more, if you can bring the, if you can bring the theory of how a game works into your educational context, you're going to be more likely to create an experience that draws your students. in Creates genuine engagement and enables them to be successful. now there's a separate part of the second part of this is collaborative versus solo play. my background and my particular area of expertise is in creating collaborative games where, where we work together to achieve an outcome. And, what I found in education is in general, collaborative games are more likely to be a perceived. as Engaging by students, precisely because humans are tribal social creatures. We want to come together to play. We want to come together to build things. And so to the extent that the, an educated. experience can bring in collaborative play. We do better, which again, can, can sometimes fly a traditional notions of pedagogy where collaboration is cheating. Well, no, it's not as collaboration. And so it's so I can, I can assess the learning and I see a lot of positive change in the education field. for example, when I was young and taking a test. you, you took your test. It was a high stress environment. You got your grade and you were done. My kids are going to a high school, so I have two, I have two kids in college, two in high school. My kids who graduated, high school and the ones that are in high school, when they take a test, they get their feedback. And they're actually allowed to take the test again to once they've worked with their teacher and other students about what they got wrong and why they got it wrong. What, why did you get that question wrong? What if it was a math test? Why did you get that question wrong? So there's feedback, but the notion of a grade is very different because the goal is that learning. And then from a game theoretic standpoint, I've changed it from a score to a strategy of how to play and in a sense, improve my score. And so I'm taking some of those elements and I'm applying them differently and I'm getting a much better result. Wow,
Jackie Guzda:Josh, thanks so much for your contribution. I hope there's others out there who want to take this opportunity to pick Luke's brain. And this is fascinating conversation. It's not my field, but you know, hashtag perks of the job. So yeah. Could we get back? I want it, you know, I'm dying to know a little bit more about participatory planning today and how the kids get
Luke Hohmann:them. Yeah. So let's take a step back in my journey. In agile software development, I started working with large corporations and to Josh's point, when I say I was working with large corporate. Pick pick a part of the world. I I've been close to it or in it. So I started pardon? Germany? Yeah. All over, Berlin Munich, the guard, Carl's room, all that Bavarian food, they call it punch in the gut cooking because. But very in food is often so heavy. You eat one meal and you feel like you're a bear hibernating for two days. so what I noticed Jackie was large corporations have to allocate resources. Because those resources are finite and those resources are budget time and, and, and, and the people within the company. Now, I know some people would say, oh, don't call them human resources. But the reality is, is there are workers. There are employees, there are contractors and consultants and, and I have these many ideas, right. I have a stack of 30 initiatives. And I have only the ability to do maybe 10 or 12 of them. How do I pick? Well, in most companies, that's a garbage process. It's a few leaders, pick them and say their opinions and cram them down on everyone else. And I started note using this notion of collaboration and gaming to create a set of techniques that converted a contentious process into a collaborative game informed process where. You were using a participatory budgeting in large corporations to manage portfolios of initiatives. So here's how it would work. Let's say your budget was a hundred million dollars and you had five people at a table. And that table could be physical or virtual. So I did it with, in-person and I built a software platform to support this. Each person at that table would be given an equal portion of the budget,$20 million. And there's that list of initiatives. And we say, okay, here's the initiatives fund, the initiative that you want. And if you run out of money or if the initiative costs more than$20 million, you have to convince other people to join. So you're moving from competitive to collaborative. And what we would do is you take that same process and now you stamp it out across the companies participants. So instead of having five people make the decision, you might have a hundred people engaged around the world in 20 groups of five people where each group is deciding how to allocate those resources. When we're done, we look at the results and the patterns are astonishing. It's super clear what the group thinks. individually, for example, I've got 20 groups. It's common to see the same three or four super important initiatives funded by all 20 groups. And by the time the game is done, the initiatives that are the least important, we'll never be. Because the opinion of other people matter when you're making these kinds of financial choices. I really want to hear Jackie, what you think about a given project, because. It may have an impact on our brand, or it may have an impact on our partners and that's not reflected in the price. And I want to know what's going on. Roll the clock forward. I took this technique into cities and I started working with hundreds and thousands of citizens in cities around the world to help dig, getting their feedback on the city budget. And then one night I just said it to my family. I said, Hey, what if we brought this into schools What if we gave kids money, actual real money and taught them how to collaboratively work together in the school to make their school better. And we tried. it And it worked. And we started with our first school Sunnyvale middle school in 2015, and we gave the kids$500 and they ended up choosing collaboratively to buy a 3d printer. The next year, the PTA gave a thousand dollars and the kids decided on their own. This is student generated ideas, no adults involved to replace the water, the water fountain with an LK water bottle refilling. station And every single adult involved said, we never would have thought of that. No kidding. You don't go to the school. You're not a kid. Who's getting their water bottle and frustrated that they can't refill it because the water fountain eats out a little bit of water and they have these big water, you know, water bottles. But now they have, and the kids care about the environment and they want to have water bottles and they want to have the right thing. And I, I was so. Taken with this idea that I decided that I wanted my next company to be solely devoted, to and committed to creating environments where participatory budgeting is brought into school. Now here's what the magic is. Here's what my learning was when the kids did. this They learn financial literacy because they have to make the decision on, they can't simply say to an adult. Oh, we think we need to get a 3d printer. Okay. Well, if you want to get it, you have to tell us how much it costs. So instead of, you know, Jane and Sateesh are going to the store with$20 to buy apples, apples costs two 13 a pound. How many apples can Jane and Sateesh buy? I mean, come on. How boring and stupid can you get as opposed to okay. You as a team, as a school, want to get a 3d. Great. How much does that cost? Hey, what's the total cost of ownership. Okay. Is that a, is that a capital expense or an operating expense? Hey, who benefits? And what we saw was it increases financial literacy and it gives us an opportunity to change the discussion about what civics and democracy really is. So now the kids go through this and I want to take a step back for a school. Participatory budgeting is a five phase process. It's not that you walk up to the kids, throw them some money and say, good luck. That's not going to work for anyone in phase one, the kids create a theme. For how they want to spend the money in the school. Is it about, resources? Is it about athletic equipment, phase two, they create ideas, phase three, they refine those ideas. Phase four, they vote on those ideas. And my favorite phases, is phase five, where they implement those ideas and they see the results of their. work They see those things implemented and created and the students choose amazing results. They do amazing things with the money. They do things that no one ever thought they would do fifth graders in at Heagle elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin, decided to get a new. To make their school more beautiful. They also got soccer debts, high schoolers at the academy of American studies, decided to get more feminine care hygiene products for the girls bathroom, which is really profound. When you think about what that is and what they need. And you're like, wow.
Jackie Guzda:In high school, way back when I was in high school, I had those thoughts. My, my female friends have
Luke Hohmann:those thoughts. That's right. And, and what's amazing. Now we can rope in civics and we can actually have discussions about what is, what is majority voting and is majority voting a good thing or a bad thing. For example, in majority voting, the majority could always keep the minority. However you define majority and minority in a sense, You can oppress a minority if you're a majority. So why do we have a Republic? Why do we have representation of votings? What other voting systems exist? There's quadratic voting, there's rank choice voting, and you can now teach our children through their own experience. What does it mean to have these different kinds of conversations who benefits, how and why, why is this relevant and important? So. What first fruit does is we have a platform. A integrated curriculum and a process that supports teachers in implementing participatory budgeting. And if they choose a complimentary financial literacy and civics curriculum, so the platform stands alone, and can be used with many other curriculums. For example, New York city department of education is so invested in participatory budgeting that. Created an entire curriculum for civics based on participatory budgeting for New York city schools. So in New York city, they use our software and their curriculum. Same thing in Chicago, in Chicago, they have Chicago, public schools has a curriculum built around participatory budgeting. Now those curriculum are of course city centric or region centric. So let's say I'm in Kansas or I'm in Florida or I'm in Hawaii. They might take our curriculum with. more adaptable and designed to be adapted by the educators towards their needs. And that's what we're doing at first group.
Jackie Guzda:Wow. Well, you know, Josh has another question in the audience and he says, when working with school boards, administrators, and regulators, how do you differentiate your business from other competitors? And what are these people looking for in your business and its effect on students?
Luke Hohmann:Yeah, the idea of, of competitors for me is kind of a funny thing because I'm a fan of financial literacy improvements and civic education, because we know that both of those are problems in our society. I'll take a step back, Josh, Josh, and then I'll talk about the notion of competitors. So our society is starting to really. Social media specifically, Facebook is creating really hard edge and worst divisions. So, it's, it's really bad. If you look at the research from Tufts university, 24% of millennials, that's one in four millennials. Think that democracy is a bad way to run the country. And there's recent data that's just been published where. W, young people no longer have any faith in the government because they see the government. We have, we used to have faith in the government because our generation was inspired by the moon landing and these amazing accomplishments. And our, and our parents were inspired by the country because we built things like the national highway system. And we, we built public works that actually benefited our society. Now, what we see is, is a government. And I really don't care if you're Democrat or Republican. There's plenty of blame on both sides. Now we see a completely sclerotic blocked system. So of course our children are losing faith. So, so Josh, our, our goal is by creating an authentic, positive civic engagement experience, our students and the data from Arizona state university supports this thesis that when students I have had the opportunity to be engaged through participatory budgeting. They see what a positive civic experience can be like. And they're more likely to graduate from high school, with, registering for vote and becoming engaged in their community. Similarly, the, the, the results that Josh is looking for is how do we measure. How do we measure outcomes? Well, we can do a few things. We can look at things like credit scores. We know that people who take a personal financial literacy courses have higher credit scores that are lower, have less, are less likely to have a personal bankruptcies. That data is from the federal reserve. Who studied the effect of personal finance training in Texas. So we've got data that shows that when people go through these programs, we are likely to create these outcomes. So Josh, one way in which I would, in which I would, in a sense, kind of compete with other alternatives is to simply say, what are the outcomes. And, and I'm an outcomes and evidence-based person, I believe in project based learning because we know the outcomes, support it and the data supports it. Josh, I'm also gonna say another thing is I'm not against other forms of competition, if you will, in the sense of. Let's take a school. That's not doing participatory budgeting. I'm going to support that school doing in, in-person participatory, budgeting, not using our software because that's an advance of what they're doing. Our goal is to make participatory, budgeting easy. And what I have seen in my professional life is. People get really excited about participatory budgeting. They get started and after a year or two, it stops because it's too hard. And what I mean by this is as, as, as educators we hear in the background. Oh, do project-based learning. It's wonderful. But the, the flip side is that project-based learning is often. more demanding of our educators and more demanding of our teachers. They're supposed to create these environments and provide individual instructions and guide students through all of these activities that can be really D that can be really, demanding of our educators. So if we want project based. We have to create what I w you know, that commercial for staples, it's just that hit that easy button. What we're trying to do with our platform is make participatory, budgeting so easy that it's trivial for part, educators to. Start it, and that's a big order because my kid used ed tech software and to be blunt, ed tech software sucks. It is garbage. It is hard to use. I I've used some of the stuff that our school district is given and my kids come to me and they're like, dad, I'm kind of stuck. And I'm like, okay, let me see if I can. I have a fricking master's degree in computer science, and I can't figure out how to make some of the software work. Like there's zero usability testing with students. There's zero accessibility testing. It's not localized into multiple languages to make it accessible for the parents to help their kids. It is garbage. So one of the things that we're trying to do, Jackie, is we're trying to take Silicon valley approaches for mass adoption and bring that into ed tech. And my goal that there's this kind of paradoxical goal. If an educator or an administrator wants to talk to me, of course, I want to talk to them, but my goal is to create software that's so beautiful, supported so well with content that is so helpful and useful that they never have. Oh, well, if they want to, but they don't have to.
Jackie Guzda:Well, have you heard much about the future of cohort-based learning online?
Luke Hohmann:I've been starting to see more of that and I'm starting to somewhat see some of that, brought in. And I think that's very exciting. I think, when we allow children to have cohort based learning, when we can understand the individual needs of the software, I don't think there's a great book by, Justin Reich, from MIT called failure to disrupt. And he talks about the great failing of AI. software dissociatives. the mood of Chris' notion that artificial intelligence is going to replace a teacher. It's just an it's nuts. You're not going to replace teachers with AI and not in our lifetime, but what you can do is you can use AI and patterns to help, promote certain patterns that can. Position a cohort, for example, to have multiple learning styles, to create a better outcome for the cohort, you can create an AI, but for example, in our own platform, some of the ways in which we are planning to use artificial intelligence is what a student is going through that refinement stage, asking a few questions of the student. Can create disproportionate, outcomes and help the teacher. So we're not going to tell the students that they've created a right or wrong, but we can say, oh, Hey, Jackie, we've noticed that you suggest that a project for a 3d printer. Have you considered the supplies for the printer? And that is secretly asking a question about the operating expenses. It's the same question that teacher could ask, but it's not replacing the notion of the teacher because now when Jackie says, I don't know how to do that, what, how, how, what do you mean now? A teacher can step in and say, oh, okay. I noticed that you're having a challenge with this area. Let's, let's work with you directly to talk about that. Or the cohort of students that are working on that proposal. They can help each other. So, so there's a role for AI in the future in education, but it's certainly not to replace the, before we fought, we move on and I can hear my family kind of in the background over here. it'd be remiss to not bring up. Lou, can you talk about participatory, budgeting and families? And, you know, I was just kind of smiling here. I don't know if everybody can see me smiling, but I'm thinking of, you know, the, the process of participatory budgeting with families and potentially vacations. Yeah. It's know, first class tickets and how much those costs cost to go here. Oh, Josh here, you're bringing up something that's really important. So let's talk about technical skills and education and life skills. I have an appreciation for how hard it is to teach technical skills, like, and I'm going to define the technical school. Jackie is something like algebra. Right. Chemistry doesn't care about your values. Does a chemical reaction, does a chemical reaction algebra doesn't care about how you feel about yourself? Because it's algebra a life skill, which would include financial literacy or civics is actually three components to have a, a proper construction there's knowledge. There's factual knowledge. What is a stock? What is it bond Or what is a vote there's skill? How do I compare to investments And, or, or how do I look at two proposals and participatory, budgeting and compare them relative to who's impacted that's a skill then there's values in financial literacy, a value might be, am I more risk tolerant, or am I more risk averse? Do I want to make investments that are aligned with my belief system about things like, the, climate change? Or do I not care about climate change? They just want to maximize my return. Similarly in civics, what are my values? Do I, am I more conservative in my values? Or am I more liberal in my values? There's no right or wrong here. It's it's it's about understanding yourself now, hooking in what Josh taught. We know that when you're talking about life skills, life skills, precede your education, meaning financial literacy and civics start the moment you're born because you're born into a family unit. What, however you define that family unit. And if you look at the research of financial literacy develop. The first financial literacy event is around the age of two. And it's a request for an item. Mommy, daddy, I want. Cereal fruit, something to eat at the store around the age four, we have one of the next really clearly defined financial events, which is called an assisted purchase. Josh is at the store, his daughters with him. She's four years old. He's trying to give her something to do to keep her occupied. And he has this epiphany. Wait, I'm going to give my daughter$10. And my daughter is going to help me buy the groceries. Now, what he actually is doing is he's saving his poor parental brain from overload because he's got his kid doing something. And what the kid is actually doing is realizing, wait, there's this thing called money. And I give money to this person and I get something and dad gets money, but I don't know how dad gets money, but dad gets money. Mom gets money. How does mom get. Around the age six week, mama has a job. Moms have been talking about her job, like why is that how mom gets money? So by the time the kid goes into school and kindergarten, first grade, they've accumulated a non-trivial amount of financial literacy. So one of the things we know is if I want to improve financial literacy, if I want to help our children make better choices, I can not only work in the school. I have to have something that works in those. I have to, and what Josh is pointing out is something that we're very committed to at first, which is the first root family edition and the first route family edition of our software. takes the same process of participatory, budgeting and creates opportunities for the family to do it together. And one of the big things that we're focusing on on is planning a family vacation because it creates so many opportunities for participation, but also education. I, I love, I love what Josh brought up when, when the kids say. Dad, can we go to Disney? and I looked up the tickets. There are only$120. Dad doesn't think tickets at Disney are$120. He's thinking, okay, I got to get there. Okay. We got to fly to Disney. That means I need a hotel. And then I got to get food. And then I got, again, I, well, you're drinking different stuff because you're the dad and you're at Disney. I get it. But, but, and then he's thinking I got to get souvenirs. And in that moment of thinking, we have an opportunity to impart our values as a family, as moms and dads. We also have an opportunity to teach really critical financial literacy concepts, things like total cost of ownership, operating expense, capital expense. Why is it okay for mom and dad to take a loan? To buy a new house or improve a house, but it's generally not okay for mom and dad to take a loan, to take a vacation. Right? Why are these things, what is the difference? Well, there's a lot of differences in a loan for a home improvement versus alone. And you see people start to make the. family choices where they're not aware of the implications. I want a really big wedding. I can pay for it with alone. I can get a quick loan from a, from a payday lender really? Is that the right choice? So that's, so Josh, thanks for bringing that up because what we're trying to, I don't really need to support chemistry instruction in the home, although it's kind of fun. I w you can always rope in chemistry with, through cooking. Or, or math if you will, but for life skills, because the kids are born into a family unit and they're already seeing how mom and dad talk about politics. They're already seeing how mom and dad talk about money or, and I'm, I'm giving a, a very traditional family unit. I apologize. I don't mean to say that the only family unit is a mom of three. There's a very rich and wonderful, diversity of, of healthy family structures. But the point is a child is born into a family. And that family structure has been imparting life skills. And if I really want to create the best outcome, I need to look at life skills as holistically as possible, which is not just the responsibility of school. It's, it's the responsibility of society to create these opportunities, to create a better outcome. Well, you're an
Jackie Guzda:amazing person. So forward thinking. Josh and Luke, I'm afraid we've run out of time. And I would be amiss without telling our audience that they can get Luke's book innovation games, where you can see all kinds of examples of the games that he has created and a discussion of them. So having said that, I want to thank Josh. Okay. Thanks, Luke, this has been such a fascinating discussion and I want to thank the people out in our community. And I'm encouraging you please to join our Facebook group because we are a community of lifelong learners. So we will keep having these astounding guests just like Luke, and you can come and pick their brains. So thank you all. And I will see you next
Luke Hohmann:week.