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Transcript

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0:01Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, Illuminating the Human Side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences, and we discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research. Welcome to another enlightening episode of Science Behind the Glass, Illuminating the Human Side.

0:30Today, we have the pleasure of delving into the captivating world of STEM education and evolutionary biology with our distinguished guest, Dr. Michael Kazumovich, Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney. Michael is not a typical biologist. He delves into understanding how social dynamics mold behaviors and traits across various species, including our own. What sets Michael apart is his innovative approach to bringing the gap between research and education using the power of video games.

1:05He pioneers an immense learning experience that captivates students’ imaginations while fostering a scientific inquiry. For the past two years, Michael’s company, Arluto, has crafted over 20 captivating learning games designed to engage students in scientific thinking. whether in traditional classroom or digital environments. Michael, thank you very much for accepting this invitation.

1:30It’s a pleasure having you here. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here, Linda. Thank you so much. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to live up to what you and Daniel just said about me, but I’ll try my best. Of course you are. To start, would you like to share how you became a person in research behavior? Yeah, absolutely. It’s a funny little kind of journey. And we all kind of go on these little things. Whenever we finish high school, we all have an idea of what we’re going to be, right? And my idea was going to be a dentist. That’s what I wanted to be when I first started. And then whenever I tell somebody that, they’re always like, ew, gross, you want to look into people’s mouths every day? This is terrible. But looking back, yeah, I don’t think I would have enjoyed that very much. And what really changed my mind was just, accidentally taking an animal behavior course in third year university. I took this course and it was just captivating, right? It was a class just like all the nature documentaries that you always saw, but it was the real science behind it. And the reason why we’re exploring, what does this help us understand about the world? What can we learn from all these other animals and testing them in various ways? And it was just awesome.

2:49There’s no other word to kind of really describe it because I just really enjoyed that experience. And after that, it completely changed my perspective on what I wanted to do. And I started doing more courses on animal behavior and evolution and it all just kind of made sense. And it was kind of really nice. And to me, it really shows the power of university and what can potentially happen when you really. just let yourself open up to that environment and try to learn things that you wouldn’t normally be be encountering to continue can you explain how studying insects and spiders contribute to our understanding of social dynamics and behavior in broader context even in human societies yeah well that’s a big question daniel my goodness that that’s going to take the whole podcast just for just for that one but um you know i first started on birds And then I realized that birds are really hard to work on because, well, they fly. And, you know, so it’s really hard to catch them. And I didn’t really enjoy putting up mist nets. And then my sample size was a little bit smaller.

3:56And it’s really hard to answer questions unless, you know, you have a larger sample size. So I really realized during my PhD that I really wanted to work on. a study organism where it’s easy to catch a lot of individuals and there’s a lot of them around. So it had to be something that were invertebrates because they’re just everywhere. And then I also wanted to have a young supervisor, someone who is really kind of starting the game and doing some interesting thing. And that’s where I met Maydian Andrade. And she was my PhD supervisor, incredible woman, still does amazing things and someone I follow very closely. But she was awesome. And she worked on spiders, which is great. But at the time when I started my PhD, I was horrifyingly arachnophobic. You know, I obviously, you know, I told the story to Maydianne that I was, you know, arachnophobic when I first started, but I only told her in the last year of my PhD. So she never knew how badly arachnophobic I was. And I told her all these things. And then she said, oh, my God, if you told me, I never would have taken you on as a student. So some things you don’t really want to be too open with your potential supervisor because it may stop that from happening. I got interested in spiders because of her. And redback spiders and widow spiders in general are just really interesting to study because they do all kinds of weird behaviors.

5:24And we can go into that if we’d like to. The interesting thing is. All animals, including humans, have evolved on this planet. And all the selective pressures that any organism has encountered has shaped the evolution, the evolutionary trajectory of that organism. And humans are no different to that. So I really like exploring things in non -human animals and then trying to apply some of those ideas on humans. And often it works really well because we aren’t. very different from all the other animals on this planet. Well, I might think that, like, wow, with the spiders and black widows, like, well, we are not quite seeing them in the court. I know. The males sacrificing themselves to the females, jumping on the fangs. Yes. To tell a little bit about this, the males are just suicidal animals, and they jump on the females’ fangs to try to cover the… female genitalia and avoided an other male’s calculator i know imagine if that’s what humans were like oh my god which which which gender would be in control of the situation then what a different world we would have that would be amazing no yes i know there would be no equity issues for women any longer that’s for sure but um not so interesting That’s

6:56exactly it, Daniel, right? For us, it’s not so good per se. But I know when you look at that extreme kind of thing, of course, it’s hard to kind of match that to humans because that would make things very, very different and very interesting. But we can learn some things from other animals, including redbacks, in how males may make choices for what they prefer in a female and how females may make choices in how they prefer. what they prefer in a male. So it does give us some insight in mate selection, preferences, choices, the distances males travel, and so on, how females attract males. So it really does kind of give a little bit of insight as well. Not the extreme insight into cannibalism, though, that’s true.

7:45And can you share how you moved from being a professor in biology to creating? And the company focused on educational video games. How this idea came up? Yeah, that was also a long road. And, you know, I think as an academic, you can take one of two roads. Well, when you kind of get an academic position, you can keep doing the same thing, which historically, I think all our predecessors were very much like that. They would work on one study organism. They would work on that study organism for their entire lives. And they would know. everything about it. And they would be that expert. And it really is an incredible thing. But that seems to be changing a lot in more recent kind of generations of academics. People tend to bounce around more on different subjects or different organisms that they’re working on. And that’s also, to me, that’s much more interesting. Because I’ve worked on crickets and spiders for a really long time. And I’ve learned some amazing things about them. But after a while, it’s like… Do I really want to watch crickets have sex some more or watch spiders eat each other again? So it kind of gets a little bit repetitive, right? And I like moving into bigger picture things and looking somewhere else. And at that time, what I really wanted to do is I wanted to start testing some of the ideas I had in non -human animals on humans.

9:14And as you can imagine, because of ethics and all those reasons, you can’t just bring a human male and a human female in a room and see if they mate you know and you know there’s there’s a lot of problems with that whole experimental design for obvious kinds of reasons but um what you can do is you can manipulate their perception of what’s going on and you can do that really really nicely by using video games and that’s what i think is wonderful about games a everyone plays them So everyone’s encountered them at some time. And playing video games, even though you don’t realize it, does alter your perception of yourself and your own value and your own ability.

10:01You can imagine if you get online and if you play with a bunch of people and you win 10 games in a row and you are just absolutely destroying your competition, you’re going to drop off that game and you’re going to go, oh man, I am so good. Right. Yes. But, you know, that’s the neat thing about humans is being good at video games just makes us feel good. And that translates to making us feel good in other areas. So we see ourselves as a better mate. We see ourselves as a better catch. We see ourselves doing better at different tasks and rate ourselves higher in the hierarchy compared to other people. And that manipulates. our perception of ourselves and how we behave towards others and therefore how others behave towards us. And that is very interesting to me. So that’s how I first got into video games because it was a really neat way to manipulate people’s perception of themselves in a predictable kind of way. And then we can kind of see what effect that has downstream and potentially why people behave the way that they do. That’s amazing. So it’s fun. It’s really fun. And then that ended up leading to me creating Arluto. Because I really did, at that point, I started to really see the power of video games.

11:28And, you know, for a very, very long time, I think the educational industry has always been looking at video games as a way to kind of engage students in learning. Because if you look, when you start playing any kind of game, games are really, really good at giving you… What you need to know right away and building your skills throughout that game, right? So they’re slowly teaching you things as you progress through the game. And then when you finish that game, you’re really good at that thing, right? And imagine if we could do that in education. Someone who’s bad at maths or bad at science, if we’re slowly helping them understand and then scaffolding other ideas on top of one another, then video games can be these incredible teachers. But I think people had it wrong. And that’s because video games can never replace teachers. Learning is truly a social endeavor. And it requires empathy.

12:21It requires people. It requires teachers who are really, really good at listening and understanding and helping students overcome barriers. And there is no way that a machine can do that. But teachers can use machines. to empower their ability within the classroom. And when you think about education in that kind of a way, then you can understand what problems do teachers have in a classroom and how can we provide them with products or materials that help them overcome those problems in the class and help kids learn better. Wow, that’s amazing. That’s a really good… way to see the pin again. I love it again. But tell us just quickly a little bit more about the experiment that you run with the males and females and how you manipulate the decisions. Yes. Of course you want to know more about that. Of course.

13:23Yeah, yeah. So we have this one. So I’ll tell you a little bit. One of my most popular studies, the most famous studies came out during Gamergate. So you can imagine that I wasn’t very loved during that period of time because it was an interesting kind of study that explored how men behave towards women when they are challenged by women who are potentially better than them at that thing. And if we think about that, that happens quite often in society, right? We have a lot of women and men working together. We see a lot of sexism, for example, in… placements for women in business school or placements for surgery, or we see that in anything where women are paid less, for example, for doing the exact same work. They may not get the same kind of enjoyment from their position and so on and so forth. So I was really kind of interested in understanding who are those people and are behaving in that kind of a way.

14:27And this is what I saw a study by a gentleman called Jeff Kuznikoff. in the US and he played 500 games of Halo during his PhD. This was a while ago. This was the original Halo. So in and of itself, that’s a pretty fun PhD, right? You’re playing video games for it. But what he did was something really interesting, which I really liked a lot. He played the games as himself, but he either didn’t speak during the game or he had a little pad where he could press a button.

15:01and respond in a male voice or a female voice. Now, this is, of course, before the time where it was really easy to do that. So it was this crazy setup and all these recordings and everything to be able to do that. And he found that when he played as a male, he got a lot of positive comments. When he played as a female, he got a lot of positive comments as well. And you can imagine after 500 games, Jeff was really good.

15:32So he was beating most people. He also found when he was speaking to others, he would get a lot of negative comments, but he would get many more or significantly more negative comments when he used a female voice. And I read this paper and I went, Jeff, this is awesome. Do you know who is behaving more negative? And that’s when he said, I’d love to look at that, but I’m really busy. I’m moving right now and I don’t have that opportunity. I said, well, can we collaborate on that? Because it’s a question I’m really interested in doing. And he was very kind to share his data, which was just absolutely incredible. And what we found is we ended up exploring that together.

16:09And what we found was that certain individuals were more likely to behave positively and negatively towards male and female voices. And it was exactly what you expect with respect to a hierarchy in non -human animals, which explains, again, as well as… why people are behaving in this way in human animals. And let me explain that a little bit more clearly for you. If you’re a man and you’re playing really well against other men, then it’s not surprising that people will treat you well. You’re doing really well and they treat you well as a consequence. And that moves you up in that hierarchy. And people, men sitting in a room, they generally understand where they sit within a hierarchy, which is quite interesting.

16:54But then video games, people are doing the same thing, even though they’re just talking to each other. If I’m a woman and I walk into a male -dominated environment and I do really well, that means I’m out -competing the other men in the room. And generally speaking, men don’t like losing. But they understand that they will lose to other men, so that’s okay. But when they lose to another woman, that’s very hard for some men to take. And there is an evolutionary explanation to this, right? If you think about it, A male’s hierarchy allows them to determine not only where they sit, but what access they have to certain resources. And those resources in non -human animals can be access to a territory, access to food, and those things that allow you access to mates. In humans, we can think about that in a very similar way. There’s a reason why men want wealth and power, because it gives them access to resources. territories and mates right because a high higher a man higher in the hierarchy is more attractive for many reasons right monetary reasons position power so on and so forth a man low in a hierarchy is not so much not as much anyway right so if you explore which men were aggressive towards women online It’s the lower

18:26performing men who are being outcompeted by women were more aggressive to women. While the men higher in the hierarchy were performing just as well as Jeff would be using a female voice, were more supportive and kind. Because they didn’t have to worry about being usurped by someone else. And that’s someone else specifically being a woman. And why that could be perceived as bad from a man is… If I’m fifth in the hierarchy, for example, and then a woman comes above me, I’m now lower in that hierarchy. It’s how we perceive ourselves and that effect that has on our behavior. And what we see is that that loss to somebody of the opposite sex has a strong effect on our self -perception of our ability.

19:15And then as a consequence, individuals lash out. And the best way to prevent losing to a woman. is to ensure they never compete again and they they have the chance like the other male all their people have the chance to see the comments that they did when they were women that’s that’s that’s the point right that’s yes they have the pressure of the other guys exactly like oh it’s just exactly right so it’s this real interesting kind of social dynamic you can start exploring different questions in that. And you can start manipulating people’s perception of their own ability and see how they behave towards others.

19:55So there’s a lot of really fun ways that you can do that in the lab. And yeah, it’s an interesting kind of way to study human behavior. Yeah, those are very interesting results. Yeah, and they fall in line with what’s happening in society, which is just so nice. So you can imagine at that point, Daniel, men did not like me. But you can also guess probably which man it was.

20:21Yeah, the lower class ones. Yes, exactly, right? Yeah, well, that’s very interesting. And moving on, video games used for science and technology are fascinating tools. How do you see these games can help bridge the gap between academia and public engagement with science? Yeah, you know, that’s one of the things I wanted to try and help when I started Arluto is often when… People engage with science in some kind of a way. The general public is usually talked at by scientists.

20:54You go to a public lecture and a scientist comes up and they tell you about their science and you go, wow, that’s cool and amazing. But you only end up attracting a certain type of individual in that kind of people who are already interested in science. And those people, we don’t need to convince. We don’t need to convince that. Science is interesting to them because they already believe that. What we want to get are those people who don’t like science or don’t see science as interesting.

21:23So how do we reach those people? That’s harder, right? But we can do that. And the way we can do that is by meeting them halfway. And what I mean by that is doing things to help those people feel comfortable in a scientific environment. Well, how can we do that? Well, everyone loves video games, right? So if we make video games that are actually science experiments, then people are playing video games. They’re being scientists without even knowing it. And then the best part, and this is what we do at our Ludo, is we take all the decisions or all the reactions that people do in a game. And anonymously, we aggregate those and make them into graphs. So we’re doing the hardest part of science, the aggregation of data.

22:14the analysis, you know, using ggplot, for example, in R. All that stuff is automatic for people who aren’t scientists. So they can go straight from playing the game and thinking, oh, why did I do that? Why did the other player do that? And then seeing the data that explains why they did that or why their opponent did that. And they go, oh, that’s so cool. Well, what happens if I do this? And then all of a sudden, They’re thinking like scientists. And that’s the thing to me. We’re all natural scientists because when we grow up, we are learning how to walk. We’re learning how to throw. Curiosity. Exactly, right?

22:58It drives everything that we do. And curiosity drives us as scientists. But most of the public never gets to see all those little things that make us curious and make us interested and drive our interest in this field. And that’s what I’m trying to do with our Ludo. Give those people that experience, that understanding of why this is cool and interesting and fun so that even if they don’t go into science, they have those scientific literacy and scientific thinking skills that they can apply in any career. That’s amazing.

23:30You did a hard work. Yeah, actually, I think that games are like little experiments. You have multiple ways to score. For sure. That you can use. Everybody who likes games is probably engaged with science deep inside them. Exactly, exactly. But they just don’t realize it. Yeah, like when they solve puzzles, they become so good at that.

23:57Exactly. And isn’t that what science is? It’s just solving a bunch of puzzles. You know, I often try and tell students it’s like being a detective. You need lots of different pieces of information and facts that you put together to tell a bigger story. That’s what science is. And I think when you start demystifying science or removing all those big words that are scary to a lot of people, that’s when people start falling into line and understanding things. And I think games do that really well. Yeah, that’s awesome. And how do you ensure that the games you create are inclusive and help all the students regardless their age, gender and socioeconomic background? Yeah, socioeconomic background is obviously the hardest, right? Because there are…

24:42especially in Australia, there are schools that have stuff and a lot of schools that don’t have stuff. And that really is the private public divide in Australia. And I think that’s very common in most countries. You’ll see a lot of variants and who has access to resources. So the one wonderful thing is with our stuff, as long as you have some kind of a device, you can play our games. And the reality is most kids have a phone. Even in lower socioeconomic levels, The thing that kids do have is access to a phone.

25:15They may not have a computer, but they do have a phone. So to me, that’s really interesting because if you can empower that device, that phone as an educational tool, that means you can start reaching a whole bunch of people that normally you couldn’t reach because they don’t have a computer. And we don’t seem to think about that in that kind of a way because we’re banning. phones in a lot of schools and these kinds of things are happening all over the place, which is unfortunate, but I think that will turn around when people realize the value that those devices have. So I think socioeconomic levels, I think that’s one of the most important because you want everybody to be able to experience science, to understand the value and potentially continue careers in those kinds of ways because that creates greater diversity, right? Yeah. And then, Linda, like you just said, you know, then you have gender diversity. cultural diversity. So we try to use as little language as we can in our games, and we could probably be better at that. But right now, unfortunately, all our stuff is only in English. But, you know, there’s a lot of really great translation services out there that are free to use. So teachers could translate that.

26:28And I’m hoping that one day, if we become large enough, we can start translating our things to help with that cultural diversity. And gender diversity is an important one as well. And you can often see more masculine individuals preferring certain types of games and more feminine individuals preferring other types of games. So how do you make a game that’s interesting to everybody? And that’s a tough thing. But our games are not games that people play for an hour or two hours or three weeks. They’re games you come in for five minutes, ten minutes. And then step out and do the science and talk about the science.

27:04There are ways to hook kids into learning. So even though we may create a game that’s a little bit more masculine or a little bit more feminine, they’re only playing it for a short period of time. So everybody tends to play and enjoy it, which is really nice to hear. But it’s something that we always think about in ensuring that we can kind of make our games attractive to as a wide variety of individuals as we can. Nice.

27:31Okay, can you share any anecdotes or success stories from classrooms where your games have been implemented? Yes, so we have one game that has become particularly popular. And that one is called Inglourious Baskers. Obviously named from Quentin Tarantino’s movie. And as you can imagine, it’s about lizards. And it’s about lizards basking. And the game teaches students all about behavioral plasticity or behavioral adaptations.

28:04And the interesting thing, it’s a game, it’s a survivor type of game or an IO kind of game where you’re trying to eat as much and survive as long as you can. So students are really familiar with these types of games. So we took that idea and we made, rather than it being a bubble, like egg RIO, where you’re trying to eat other things that are smaller than you, we made them into lizards. And you had to… Basking in the sun to get your body temperature up. You need to spend time eating a bunch of food to keep your energy up. You need to stay away from predators.

28:37And you have to compete against others on this tiny island. And it’s this really fast -paced game that kids have absolutely loved. And it’s wonderful to see just how much they enjoy it. But not only that, is once they finish playing, A, they don’t want to stop playing, obviously. Once they finish playing, they have all these amazing insights into why they’re doing the things they do. It’s essentially like teaching students animal behavior and showing them a video. But instead, they’re the lizard. And it puts them in that time and space and makes them think like that. And that gives them a completely new perspective on what’s going on. And they just intuitively understand because they’re doing the things that those lizards are doing in nature. And the results are really, really similar and very cool. So it’s very fun to see. Oh, that’s amazing. I want to play. You should. You should. Definitely.

29:43Everyone should. I guess that kids who play this game are less likely to go and throw rocks to lizards. Probably. interesting to to know yes knowing the struggles that they go through yeah absolutely and you know i’ve had parents who have emailed me and just said you know my son went through your program or my daughter went through your program and we’re taking a hike now and they’re just telling me stuff that i didn’t even know about and they’ve learned these things about the world so thank you it’s just like that’s exactly what we were hoping to do So it’s amazing that we’re having that kind of an effect, even on a small number of kids, which I think is really, really cool. Quite rewarding.

30:28Yeah, it is. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s definitely what drives us. And what challenges have you encountered when promoting the adoption of games for STEM education and how you overcome them? Specifically, for example, how do you manage to get the software developments around and working all together in the same page? Yes. So from a development side, creating a game requires a heck of a lot of skills, right? Especially an educational game, right? So you need programmers, you need designers, you need artists, and then you start getting an educational game. Well, you need scientists and you need educators. That’s a lot of different groups and a lot of people that have to collaborate. It’s super fun, though.

31:14It’s a lot of fun. And, you know, we get the opportunity to think about All these complex scientific things and breaking them down for students in these really kind of stepwise and more simplified ways. And it’s super fun to explore. But yes, it requires a lot of different skill sets, which is also very cool because I’ve got a chance to be a lot more creative. And as a scientist, we don’t get that opportunity very often. And that’s super fun and super rewarding.

31:43And it’s really nice to be able to collaborate with people who are unlike you and have a different skill set. And we often don’t see that a lot in science. So that’s been one of the most rewarding things from doing this kind of stuff, which has been great. That’s amazing. And besides that challenge, how other challenges have you seen that is the most tricky ones to still getting or overcoming? So there’s two. One of them is always money, right? Because you need… You need to be able to support a team and such a diverse team, right? Which is obviously very, very difficult. So that’s always one hurdle.

32:23You’re looking for grants and you’re trying to find money and sponsorship and this and that. And at the same time, the other thing that’s quite difficult is changing the mindset of users, of teachers largely, and principals and things like that. Because often when people think of games, they go, oh, that’s something kids do for fun. And I do not want them playing more video games. They’re already playing on the screen too much already. Yes, but that’s a different problem. You know, the reality is we can co -opt this game and it can be super beneficial for kids. So really changing the mindset of how people think. And when people think about educational games, they often think about really kind of boring simulations. That’s what we often see as games. And sure, they may look a bit more educational. but kids don’t enjoy them and if they’re not enjoying them they’re not really learning anything and simulations have this have this awful thing where it’s just like okay here’s a couple buttons on the screen and something’s happening and you press those buttons and you can see those things changing it’s like no kid ever understands that it’s just like putting you know piece of equipment there and turning a bunch of knobs and what is what happens if i do this what happens if i do this people don’t really learn by doing that they have to be challenged by something and have to overcome that challenge that’s when we really learn so we create games more like they should be where they are challenges

33:53that people need to progress and the only way they can progress is by learning the things they have to and that’s where i think again games are really really powerful and the way they should be used in education yeah hopefully people will will understand sooner better than later this this kind of approach I hope so too, Daniel. And finally, what advice would you give to educators or researchers who are interested in using technology and games to enhance scientific learning and engagement among the students? This is one of my most interesting aspects about my research, I think, is trying to find new ways to use technology.

34:37There’s all kinds of technology around us, and it’s starting to do some incredible things. We’re able to do things we’ve never been able to do before. You’re analyzing data much more quickly. You’ve got AI that can automatically associate or classify things for us. So it saves us all this kind of time. And we’re using those kinds of things in very traditional kind of ways. But I think what’s interesting is using some of the tech that is created for businesses and co -opting that for science and going in an often different direction. There’s lots of really cool, tech out there i think one of the the most interesting studies that i saw most recently co -opting things like chat gpt and word use is they looked at something about creativity and what they asked people to do is this really simple test is they simply just ask people to write down five words that they can think of that are as different from one another as possible and i think that’s kind of interesting Because what’s happening there is you’re asking people to think about a word, let’s say house. And then the next word you think of has to be as dissimilar as possible.

35:54So you could say something like moon. That’s pretty different to a house. But dog is also different, but less different because dogs live in houses and people live in houses together, right? So that’s similar. But the way they actually assess similarity between words is by using the whole sentences of words and seeing how often different words appear with one another. So here’s an interesting use of technology where essentially you’re using chat GPT or AI to assess how close or how similar words are simply based by how often they are used by humans in written word.

36:39And I think that’s a really interesting way of trying to assess someone’s creativity and use technology to do that. So if we think about a problem, we have these very traditional ways that we solve them as scientists. But if we really step outside that box, we can start thinking of really new and interesting and unique ways to tackle these problems that I think can give us much better insight into how the world works than our more traditional perspectives. Yeah, I think that you made a really big point that is like moving out of your comfort zone and then talking with or making collaboration with other people. And it’s a big challenge because when you think about it, I don’t know how to do that.

37:22I don’t know. I don’t. Yeah, we don’t have the skills because someone else can come here. Exactly. Yes. It’s again, it’s making that team of people who have a different sets of skills. And like you said, it is often a hard and terrifying thing, but it can be super rewarding. and a lot of fun if you find the right collaborators yeah that’s true now they are they have a big push for the vr virtual reality yes experiences right yes yes but it’s really cool it’s just like i completely changed your mind and how you are located even if it’s in those 2d um For example, in Google Maps, and you see everything is just like you feel like you are there. I know, crazy, isn’t it? But it is so cool for education purposes and exhibitions with science. I think for scientific exhibitions, I think it’s extremely powerful.

38:16For education, I think it’s less powerful because it comes back to that point that you mentioned, socioeconomic status, right? Until that is so affordable that every kid can use it, all we’re doing is we’re increasing that class divide. I think there, I think it can work really, really well because it can immerse somebody in that scientific experience. But that’s because people are going to be immersed in using somebody else’s equipment. The average individual does not have a VR set at home and the average kid will not.

38:52And that means schools have to spend a lot of money to buy all that tech. And that tech moves at lightning speed. You buy something now, next year it is out. You need to buy it again. And it’s such a waste of technology. It’s such a waste of product. Until these things are glasses, I don’t see this happening and working. But it’s interesting to see that push in society with people thinking that. vr is going to solve educational problems when vr has actually been around for almost 50 years and it still is not you know used by a large proportion of the population yeah i think one of the problems is not only the well the technology i like access to the technology but i it would be more accessible if they just merged for example with museums for sure that could be absolutely In those kinds of situations, I think it can work really, really well. Yes. Thank you, Michael. My pleasure. I know it’s so cool. I hope I’ve shared some interesting stuff and some things that people listening might have found a little bit fun. And thank you so much for the opportunity, both of you. An amazing interview. Well, video games can sometimes be a headache for parents because kids don’t want to step away from their consoles. Science shows

40:24that video games can significantly enhance science education. Players, especially hardcore games, develop problem -solving skills through gaming by consistently employing metacognitive strategies. These strategies include taking conscious control of learning, planning and selecting appropriate tools, monitoring progress, correcting errors, analyzing effectiveness of learning strategies, and adjusting learning behaviors as needed. What do you think, Dani? That is very interesting.

40:56It’s quite a skill. However, it is remarkable what our guest said, that a science video game won’t replace a teacher or a classroom. Instead, it provides an interactive learning experience that can engage people of all ages. This interactive approach can make learning more accessible and enjoyable. bridging the gap between traditional education and modern technology. That’s right. And speaking of bridging gaps, let’s revisit the fascinating topic of studying animal behavior.

41:25This research not only helps us to understand how animals adapt to different conditions, but also reveals how similar we are to other species and how we can apply these theories to human behavior. For example, the strategies spiders use for hunting in different environments, from fishing in rivers to using pheromones or camouflage to trap prey, are incredibly innovative. These strategies have even inspired advancements in technology and warfare. Yeah, that is very interesting.

41:58Solutions based in nature is the way to go. I like that our guest’s career shows how human creativity beyond scientific training, in this case developing video games, is connecting with people who share a vision and are willing to collaborate without immediate funding or even salary in something as important as education. Despite the challenges, passion and perseverance makes it possible to create something truly impactful.

42:26Thank you for joining us in this episode. This episode was inspired by video games and the paper Are Games Effective Learning Tools? We have included the references to this material and our guest webpage in the episode description. Remember, this podcast is self -funded and edited by its host. You can support us listening our podcast on our YouTube channel. Don’t forget to give like and subscribe. You can also listen to our podcast on Spotify and our official website.

42:57Follow us on our social media on X, Facebook, and Instagram. Original music by our colleague and friend, Bernardo Aguiar. The technical support from our promotions manager and friend, Rafael Giordano.