In my recent posts I have been grappling with the question of how we teach 21st Century skills, basically startup skills, in the important and impressional teenage years. I show an example of a legendary Silicon Valley teacher who is teaching the way that real companies work by giving youth real media startups to run. This post is about how we do this by harnessing  the power of games to teach 21st Century skills at scale.

Games dominate the entertainment mind share of the current generation. By the time he or she turns 20, the average kid has spent 10,000 hours playing games. That is enough time to be a virtuoso in just about anything. Our society has amazing pathways to channel that much time towards turning a kid into an athlete or a dancer or a musician but we don’t have the same pathways for teaching the skills that they will likely spend the rest of their lives doing: creative problem solving, finding solutions to problems that affect the planet, designing, building, and managing. The first 20 years of life don’t prepare them for that.

We know that games can inspire youth to become creators, leading to the development of critical 21st century skills. The act of making games involves a diverse mix of creative, technical and management disciplines and, with the proper scaffolding, could well emerge as an amazing tool to empower our youth to become the next generation of creators, makers and innovators.

Join me as I explore why I am devoting myself to this mission:

The digital age ahead has so much promise but only if every kid can be empowered with the skills to thrive within it. Right now, skills like effective collaboration and problem solving, coding, design, and product and project management, take countless hours to learn. They are best learned through experience, not books. How do you engage kids to learn these digital skills that will be so important in their lives? Schools are mostly not teaching these skills. Current solutions rely on youth engaging willingly, on their own, outside of regular school hours. Today’s learning experiences either aren’t scalable, like having teachers, or don’t sustain most kid’s interest, like online classes. So how are youth going to learn these skills?

This may seem insurmountable. But I believe that there is a solution. Our answer comes down to something simple: we lean into what is already working. That’s why we’re building a platform that will change the way youth engage in game making to support 21st Century skill building.

Game Creation

The young child's definition of play so often involves creating. From Legos and sand castles to paintings and tree forts, creating and playing are often one in the same. We see this in video games too: On average, teenagers enter the workforce having spent 20 hours per week playing games - that is half a workweek of video games. Many of the most successful games, like Minecraft, are all about building. We see that kids like building games as much as playing them.

Platforms like Minecraft and Roblox unlock this for younger kids. Children grow up and their tools evolve, but the core need to create remains the same. So, after Minecraft, then what?

There is an opportunity to build a game creation experience tailored to teens and young adults, one that harnesses 21st century skills to naturally, seamlessly connect the innate desire to build whatever is in one’s imagination to real hands-on life experience. The process of building games cultivates just about every major digital discipline. It involves engineering, design, digital art, project management, writing and marketing. And therein lies the hook to teach these skills.

The Tools

There is a big gap in the market, however. We know that kids love building games and that they like to build together. But the tools to build real games are too complicated; and the skills required to drive those tools, skills like coding, take time to master.

Tools like Scratch are great for very young children. It is now the world’s largest creative coding community, with 43 million registered users. It was a step-function improvement in coding education in 2007 when it was launched. But kids quickly age out of it. They get bored building simple 2D games that can’t compare to consumer games. And development is solitary.

Then there are professional game engines like Unity. Unity is near magic in how powerful it is; however, it is also a complicated professional tool. You can think of it like Final Cut Pro, the professional movie making suite. It is incredible if you have put in the immense time and effort to develop the skills needed to make a movie. But most people can’t use it.

Some people might ask about Roblox. Roblox is an incredible gameplay phenomenon, but still less than 1% of its players build. In Minecraft, 100% of players are creators. So why is it that in the two most popular gaming franchises on the planet, one has everyone creating and the other has less than 1% creating? Is that because less than 1% of Roblox players want to build? We believe that it’s still too hard for most youth to make games with their editor. We also believe that the creation process in Roblox is too solitary. It doesn’t take advantage of the social nature that makes their gameplay such a phenomenon.

To have a community of budding young game creators, you must also have a tool that budding young game creators can use.

Teens want to build games, but there is a gap between the tools designed for kids in schools, like Scratch, and the professional engines that people graduate with degrees to learn to operate. This is the first gap. There needs to be the equivalent of iMovie or TikTok for games.

A Community

As we lean into what works, we also know that online communities create enduring connections between people around a shared passion or interest. There are countless such communities. Nexus Mods has 30 million people releasing modified versions of successful consumer games. GitHub represents all of the open source communities that bubble up, fostering collaboration for new software. 98% of the world’s running software is open source, much of that powered by GitHub. Our own story of developing Endless OS introduced me to how incredible the Linux community of volunteers is in enabling software-making on a global scale.

People will act on a collective interest at a global scale. The internet was built by people in such communities. Take a look at DeviantArt and Behance to see what happens when artists and designers come together. These communities are some of the most inspiring parts of the internet. Twitch and Discord have served as platforms for hundreds of millions of people to join communities. And the most successful games like Minecraft and Roblox grew thanks to their communities.

Teenagers are spending massive amounts of time in these places. Willingly.

Let's learn from these communities. Lean into them. Being part of a community is a basic biological need, especially for teens. Youth yearn for an opportunity to be social while they play and make things. It is just more satisfying to experience these things together.

There needs to be a community that gives youth a natural place to do that while building games.

A Learning Service

The tools and community are the first two legs to the stool. The third is the support structure. There is a category of startups designed to teach through learning services, like Whitehat Jr, iD Tech Camp and Byjus's. These one-to-one and group mentorship programs highlight the importance of having a good teacher. Byjus's has taught 115 million kids and is worth $22 billion. Its success is a reflection of the importance of a live teacher. There are probably thousands of similar local camps, clubs, and mentoring and tutoring programs. They are successful because mentorship matters, especially in a long, exploratory learning journey.

On our own journey, our first theory was that games on their own can teach. It is true. They can teach a lot. But games alone will never compare to the power of having someone helping you. Just-in-time mentorship gives the handholding and structure that many of us need. With the freedom to build one’s own games or join community projects, learning is based on following one’s passions rather than recipe-based learning. But with mentorship you’re never alone.

It is also critical that youth have an opportunity to be recognized for their accomplishments and build a portfolio of their work. The recognition helps build confidence, reputation and credentials. The portfolio becomes the tangible evidence of the mastery that they have developed. Together these are critical tools for people to pursue higher education, employment and network building. The stakes of these games can lead to real world opportunities. They can lead you to a career.

A Tool, A Community, and a Learning Service Combined

So let's synthesize what we believe: youth want to build games and building games is a great vehicle for learning. But we see 3 gaps. The first is a tool that makes it so that anyone can be a game developer. The second is a community for youth to build games collaboratively. The third is a network of professionals and mentors that can guide and teach community members.

This is what we are building. We call it Endless Studios. Endless Studios is a globally distributed, massively-open youth-centered game studio where the next generation of creators apprentice with professionals to create games for an ever-expanding metaverse where you can make anything and mod everything.

It is a community of like-minded individuals creating games, and trying their hands at the skills that excite them most, like coding, digital art, production, writing, music, and marketing.

Collectively, they publish real games. It includes tools to make game development easier. This simple, collaborative game development tool is built upon Unity, scaffolding one’s skills, slowly revealing more game engine capabilities as you level up into the actual Unity editor. Finally, the community has an embedded apprenticeship-based learning service at its core. There are teachers and game professionals dedicated to mentoring you on your journey.

We believe in seeding the community with ambitious projects that can become enduring experiences through collaborative creation over time. As an example, this Studio is working on a game called The Endless Mission, a game that grapples with the soul of technology where you can play anything and hack everything. The Endless Mission is an evocative world with a high stakes narrative that invites creators to extend it. It also includes foundational gameplay experiences with diverse systems and mechanics, giving the developers a foundation from which to build on and the independence to add their creative voice and vision. In building and playing The Endless Mission, players will fight to defend the soul of technology.

I believe that Endless Studios is the most engaging way to learn 21st Century skills. It leans into what youth already love. It is scalable. And if we are right, we have a real solution for overcoming the barriers that prevent kids from developing the skills they will need to thrive.