RezEd Podcast, Episode 28- [TRANSCRIPTION] Jim Bower on the 10th Anniversary of Whyville
Rezed Podcast #28 Transcription For the first special podcast for the new year of RezEd, we sat down with Jim Bower, the CVO of Numedeon, who ten years ago this month launched their
virtual world Whyville.net. Jim takes us back to the nineties, to look at the origins of virtual worlds for learning, and share his vision for the future. Let's check it out.
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Barry: This is Barry Joseph here at Global Kids and I'm excited to be talking today with James Bower, founder and CVO of Numedeon. That's CVO, Chief Visionary Officer. Numedeon ten years ago launched Whyville.net. Whyville was one of the first virtual worlds for children and one of the few whose purpose is explicitly educational. They now have a player base of over three million
young people, engaged in activities, sponsored by a wide range of government, non-profit, and corporate entities. For more details about what youth do in Whyville and its educational applications,
please listen to RezEd Podcast #20, featuring academic Debra Fields. But today we want to congratulate them on launching Whyville one decade ago this month, in March 1999. Here are some of what they learned along the way and what their predications are for both themselves, virtual worlds and learning, over the next decade to come. So Jim, congratulations!
Jim: Sure. It's pretty remarkable how time flies when you're having fun and I'll try to have that be the last cliché in this podcast, but no, it's been a fascinating ten years.
Barry: Let’s go back to the beginning. How did Whyville come about?
Jim: Well, it’s interesting looking at your introduction, in which you said we launched the virtual world that was one of the first learning-based worlds. In fact, what we launched was a
learning-based world that became known as a virtual world. Whyville was designed from first principles, to be a space that we thought would maximally engage kids in learning. And we described it as such, but actually based on seventeen years of research that I did while I was running an operation in Caltech called CAPSI, Caltech Pre-College Science Initiative. CAPSI was an outreach effort to public schools in science math STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] education and after those seventeen years, most of CAPSI was involved in working with real teachers, real classrooms, inquiry-based, hands-on science, teacher training, professional developments, etc. working in the school districts, politics, text book companies, federal governments, etc. of twenty two million dollars worth actually. But one strain through all of those seventeen years was the question: how do you use computers and computer networks, in particular to engage kids in learning in a way that supplements and enhances, but does not replace, the real world? And in that design, we decided actually in 1987, to design what we would now call a virtual world in hypercard, on the Macintosh…
Barry: For those not familiar with hypercard, could you say a few words about what that was about?
Jim: Hypercard was a Macintosh based application that was quite cool, in that it was relatively simple to manipulate. Essentially, the metaphor was a card stack. In the old days and
still in schools, kids can learn by animation, by getting a bunch of 2x5 cards, drawing on each one a slightly different shape, and then flipping them. And in effect, simulating movement. Hypercard
was designed basically to allow people to build animation simply and easily, by making a simulated flip card deck. But for us it was sort of an inexpensive, very flexible way to design a space for
kids where they could actually use their knowledge of the real world to explore virtual libraries.
We actually published three period papers on the use of essentially, a simulated virtual world or a simulated virtual library by kids, as a mechanism that actually understands libraries. We didn't know it was going to be successful but we realized that we actually installed this in the LA school district,
or actually the LA Central Library. About two months later, we got a phone call from a librarian, asking to remove the Macintosh's and the reason that she gave was that the line of children waiting to use the two Macintosh's was obstructing the card catalog. There's a metaphor there. I actually told her they don't use the card catalog anyway. They are using [the Macintosh’s].
It turns out what really bothered her about it was that they were actually using this software to play games, to find the book games. She felt there was no place in libraries for games created by kids.
I tried to explain to her play and primates from a learning [perspective], being a neurobiologist I know about those things, but she just thought it was absurd that these children were lining up to do this and not at the library for looking for books. Terrible idea having children not looking for books and so we had to take it out. We did publish three papers on it, so there is an academic benefit, but more than that, we realized at that point how powerful simulating 3D spaces could be for engagement, coupled with gaming, given we are play primates and our brains process information in 3D worlds. That is where Whyville came from.
Barry: And so the application that you had running in the libraries, I'm picturing that from my understanding of hypercards, did that have a 3D component? Or is that something that came
after?
Jim: It was like Whyville, it was two and a half deep, that is how you describe it, and the way it worked was the first thing…again if you saw this, and by the way, I just found the discs, I'm a pack rat with just about everything. I just found the disc from 1986, you know, the small hard Mac floppies, and I'm now trying to figure out a way to open them, which involves buying lots of hardware on eBay. Anyway, so not that long ago the structure was the following and it's not unlike Whyville today. Not surprisingly, I guess. We had a library and we had what essentially was a virtual
3D browsing interface, where kids could walk through the stacks sitting on the computer, on a Macintosh. That was the first thing.
The second thing was, how do you motivate kids to want to do that? So we built a 2D simulated world, which was actually a farm, a farming community, in which children could walk around in the farm space. In that space they would encounter animals periodically, and the animals would run away. But the kid knew, they knew that if they found out something about the animal they could actually befriend the animal. Then once they befriended the animal, the animal would take the kid on a tour of its’ world, which the child could only get to with the animal’s tour.
Barry: Nice.
Jim: And of course, the way they found out about the animals was by reading specific reports.
Barry: In the library itself?
Jim: In the library. So if you ran across a raccoon, a little icon popped up at the top that said there's a book available. If you want to befriend this raccoon, you click on that and it would take you to the stacks where the book was, so you go upstairs. You look at the book. You come back down and in this case, if I remember, they actually had to give the raccoon corn. When you gave the raccoon corn, it would take you on a tour of its space, but halfway through its’ space, you would run into a frog, which would run away unless you wanted to learn something about
frogs. That's how it worked.
The genesis of this was actually watching my own children playing early Nintendo spiral computer games. What I realized was, it wasn’t about hitting the bricks with your head, it wasn't about killing things, it was really about exploring the world. And those were the things, like hitting the brick with your head, or killing something, those were the things the game designers put in place for you to do as quests. The real motivation was fully exploring the world, which was a very natural primate, human motivation. So I thought if instead of shooting something, you could motivate kids to read a book so they could further explore the world, that would work just as well. We actually found out that it worked better. Oddly enough, what are we now, twenty three-four years later, the gaming world is only slowly catching up to the fact that it isn't about shooting, it's about learning. It isn't about killing, it's about exploration. It isn't about single shooter, it’s about community. It just takes a long time for people who are in control of media, to realize that their poor assumptions are part right,
mostly wrong, and they can do much better if they had more respect for the customers they serve. Anyway, it's been a fun run for that length of time.
Barry: So ten years ago, what did it look like when you launched it? What was the situation? How many of you were in a room? What did it look like to launch it? If someone was watching above, what would they have seen? What were you expecting ten years
ago?
Jim: We knew from ten years before, that this would work. The previous ten years we made more sophisticated kinds of games. We learned more about the interfaces. We invented bubblechat, although we didn't patent it unfortunately. We realized that another key component to kids' engagement, or human engagement, is the ability to customize things, make them your own. I realized that from my daughter. As a Caltech professor, I had the Internet to my house before most people knew the Internet existed, and so my daughter was on some of the first chat sites. I remember once it was dinnertime and I went in to talk to her and said, “Kate it's time to come to dinner”. She said, “Dad I can't because I've just been declared to be God of the chat site, and it took me a long time to become God and I don't want to leave it”. I said, “Kate (she was about twelve), you have to eat. Probably even God has to eat. But anyway, so you have to come eat”. She came and wolfed her food down, then went back to the computer. Ten minutes later, no one knew who she was. She went from God to nobody in ten minutes because there was no persistence. So I realized that another piece of these worlds would have to be the ability to have persistence that solely built up your personality, that built up your place in the world and built your reputation in the world that is very human primate type. So you knew all these things. The question was convincing somebody.
The initial question was in principle, in the late 1990's. There is a spectacular amount of money laying around to do interesting things on the Internet, most of which was spent on doing completely
uninteresting things on the Internet. We thought we were pretty interesting. Of course, it turned out we were too interesting, and it was very hard. I had very hard conversations with high levels of
people with a lot of money in very strong positions say this sort of structure is the ideal structure for not only kids, but humans of the Internet.
I remember one conversation with a major organization, which will go nameless, and the very top of that organization, whose name was recognized all over the world in the IT area. I presented this idea
to them and the response was that human beings are lazy and they have short attention spans, so this will never work. I said no no no. I think this was the first time I might have used the word
“engaged” in this context. I said, you know, it isn't about the number of eyeballs watching, it’s about how the brains attached to those eyeballs get engaged. They just denied that humans were like that, and I actually looked around the room and said “well that explains to me some of your products”. That was more or less the end of that conversation. Basically, we decided in 1999 to do it
ourselves. Four of us, we are all still with the company, decided to self-finance and watch it. We are now at 4.1 million, actually 4.5 million users. We made it to a million registered users with four people.
Barry: In how many years roughly?
Jim: It took us about six years to get to a million, and we are now over four million. Last year we added a million, so we are on an exponential curve.
Barry: I think about the time you hit a million, it was just about the beginning, and correct me if I'm wrong, about the beginning at the time that the term virtual world was being used to describe what you were doing.
Jim: That's right. Second Life has done wonders for us because it became a media sensation, and prior to Second Life, I had to explain what a virtual world was. Now I just have to explain that they are not all the same. Probably the most interesting thing that we are watching is that when we started, and even to this day with all the transitioning, most people still think about measuring the value of media, or the Internet, or some site on the Internet, primarily in terms of eyeballs. Otherwise known as number of unique visitors, or worse yet, number of registered users.
There is a transition happening now, clearly, where people are realizing that it's not only that they are there, it is how long they are there, and what they are doing. So engagement, which I now
refer to as the "E" word, everyone is talking about, and very few people know how to measure it. The multibillion-dollar question is, how do you monetize it? Our posit, ten years ago, we set out to
engage. We believed that looking at humans, things that humans are willing to engage in to the greatest extent, is learning, where the learning confers a social or economic benefit. That’s why as a
professor at Caltech, I can charge thirty thousand dollars a year for students to come in and let me torture them in exchange for which I give them a piece of paper. This would suggest that humans
value learning. Now at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where we charge less, we torture them to the same extent and they still end up with a piece of paper. There is some evidence that humans
value learning, and it's what they are willing to spend a great deal of their life doing.
What is interesting to watch now, and I think we're just at the threshold now, and research like Global Kids does, other organizations, especially funded by the MacArthur Foundation, that has been very much in the forefront of recognizing that this is a new venue and new opportunity and worth understanding at the research level, but also at the applications level, but you are now starting to hear Toyota or Disney, to some extent, the Getty Foundation, amongst others, realizing that there's an opportunity here with this technology to engage, that is connected to learning.
I think, to go back to the first question that you asked, ten years from now this transition will be complete, that the metrics that are used to monetize the Internet as a media thing, will be
engagement/learning metrics. Companies will be figuring out how to build learning around their products and when their products can't bear the scrutiny, might even change their products. Kids, there is already evidence for this, will be the most sophisticated in the human industry with respect to the texting dumb marketing and ignoring it and preferring to engage in consumer, student learner
centered marketing, sponsorship, advertising, learning, education, all as the same thing.
Not to sound too pie in the sky or sort of sparkly eye glasses, but having watched this now for almost twenty five years, and knowing something about primates and human behavior, that has the
potential, especially sitting in this room and looking at pictures of kids in Guyana, given its connectivity, it really has the potential to change the world. That's why we started this and added
fun to see some of the guesses we made along the way maybe start to pan out and it's going to be a lot of fun to watch the next ten years.
Barry: Jim I hope that in ten years from now, we get to talk about how we got to that place, what obstacles we had to overcome to get there, and I can talk about the next ten years from there.
Thank you for talking with us today.
Jim: Hope to be here. Thanks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This was a special podcast from RezEd. Join us for our next regularly scheduled podcast where we will speak with Constance Steinkuehler about World of Warcraft. See you then.
To return to this podcast's audio and shownotes, click here.
virtual world Whyville.net. Jim takes us back to the nineties, to look at the origins of virtual worlds for learning, and share his vision for the future. Let's check it out.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry: This is Barry Joseph here at Global Kids and I'm excited to be talking today with James Bower, founder and CVO of Numedeon. That's CVO, Chief Visionary Officer. Numedeon ten years ago launched Whyville.net. Whyville was one of the first virtual worlds for children and one of the few whose purpose is explicitly educational. They now have a player base of over three million
young people, engaged in activities, sponsored by a wide range of government, non-profit, and corporate entities. For more details about what youth do in Whyville and its educational applications,
please listen to RezEd Podcast #20, featuring academic Debra Fields. But today we want to congratulate them on launching Whyville one decade ago this month, in March 1999. Here are some of what they learned along the way and what their predications are for both themselves, virtual worlds and learning, over the next decade to come. So Jim, congratulations!
Jim: Sure. It's pretty remarkable how time flies when you're having fun and I'll try to have that be the last cliché in this podcast, but no, it's been a fascinating ten years.
Barry: Let’s go back to the beginning. How did Whyville come about?
Jim: Well, it’s interesting looking at your introduction, in which you said we launched the virtual world that was one of the first learning-based worlds. In fact, what we launched was a
learning-based world that became known as a virtual world. Whyville was designed from first principles, to be a space that we thought would maximally engage kids in learning. And we described it as such, but actually based on seventeen years of research that I did while I was running an operation in Caltech called CAPSI, Caltech Pre-College Science Initiative. CAPSI was an outreach effort to public schools in science math STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] education and after those seventeen years, most of CAPSI was involved in working with real teachers, real classrooms, inquiry-based, hands-on science, teacher training, professional developments, etc. working in the school districts, politics, text book companies, federal governments, etc. of twenty two million dollars worth actually. But one strain through all of those seventeen years was the question: how do you use computers and computer networks, in particular to engage kids in learning in a way that supplements and enhances, but does not replace, the real world? And in that design, we decided actually in 1987, to design what we would now call a virtual world in hypercard, on the Macintosh…
Barry: For those not familiar with hypercard, could you say a few words about what that was about?
Jim: Hypercard was a Macintosh based application that was quite cool, in that it was relatively simple to manipulate. Essentially, the metaphor was a card stack. In the old days and
still in schools, kids can learn by animation, by getting a bunch of 2x5 cards, drawing on each one a slightly different shape, and then flipping them. And in effect, simulating movement. Hypercard
was designed basically to allow people to build animation simply and easily, by making a simulated flip card deck. But for us it was sort of an inexpensive, very flexible way to design a space for
kids where they could actually use their knowledge of the real world to explore virtual libraries.
We actually published three period papers on the use of essentially, a simulated virtual world or a simulated virtual library by kids, as a mechanism that actually understands libraries. We didn't know it was going to be successful but we realized that we actually installed this in the LA school district,
or actually the LA Central Library. About two months later, we got a phone call from a librarian, asking to remove the Macintosh's and the reason that she gave was that the line of children waiting to use the two Macintosh's was obstructing the card catalog. There's a metaphor there. I actually told her they don't use the card catalog anyway. They are using [the Macintosh’s].
It turns out what really bothered her about it was that they were actually using this software to play games, to find the book games. She felt there was no place in libraries for games created by kids.
I tried to explain to her play and primates from a learning [perspective], being a neurobiologist I know about those things, but she just thought it was absurd that these children were lining up to do this and not at the library for looking for books. Terrible idea having children not looking for books and so we had to take it out. We did publish three papers on it, so there is an academic benefit, but more than that, we realized at that point how powerful simulating 3D spaces could be for engagement, coupled with gaming, given we are play primates and our brains process information in 3D worlds. That is where Whyville came from.
Barry: And so the application that you had running in the libraries, I'm picturing that from my understanding of hypercards, did that have a 3D component? Or is that something that came
after?
Jim: It was like Whyville, it was two and a half deep, that is how you describe it, and the way it worked was the first thing…again if you saw this, and by the way, I just found the discs, I'm a pack rat with just about everything. I just found the disc from 1986, you know, the small hard Mac floppies, and I'm now trying to figure out a way to open them, which involves buying lots of hardware on eBay. Anyway, so not that long ago the structure was the following and it's not unlike Whyville today. Not surprisingly, I guess. We had a library and we had what essentially was a virtual
3D browsing interface, where kids could walk through the stacks sitting on the computer, on a Macintosh. That was the first thing.
The second thing was, how do you motivate kids to want to do that? So we built a 2D simulated world, which was actually a farm, a farming community, in which children could walk around in the farm space. In that space they would encounter animals periodically, and the animals would run away. But the kid knew, they knew that if they found out something about the animal they could actually befriend the animal. Then once they befriended the animal, the animal would take the kid on a tour of its’ world, which the child could only get to with the animal’s tour.
Barry: Nice.
Jim: And of course, the way they found out about the animals was by reading specific reports.
Barry: In the library itself?
Jim: In the library. So if you ran across a raccoon, a little icon popped up at the top that said there's a book available. If you want to befriend this raccoon, you click on that and it would take you to the stacks where the book was, so you go upstairs. You look at the book. You come back down and in this case, if I remember, they actually had to give the raccoon corn. When you gave the raccoon corn, it would take you on a tour of its space, but halfway through its’ space, you would run into a frog, which would run away unless you wanted to learn something about
frogs. That's how it worked.
The genesis of this was actually watching my own children playing early Nintendo spiral computer games. What I realized was, it wasn’t about hitting the bricks with your head, it wasn't about killing things, it was really about exploring the world. And those were the things, like hitting the brick with your head, or killing something, those were the things the game designers put in place for you to do as quests. The real motivation was fully exploring the world, which was a very natural primate, human motivation. So I thought if instead of shooting something, you could motivate kids to read a book so they could further explore the world, that would work just as well. We actually found out that it worked better. Oddly enough, what are we now, twenty three-four years later, the gaming world is only slowly catching up to the fact that it isn't about shooting, it's about learning. It isn't about killing, it's about exploration. It isn't about single shooter, it’s about community. It just takes a long time for people who are in control of media, to realize that their poor assumptions are part right,
mostly wrong, and they can do much better if they had more respect for the customers they serve. Anyway, it's been a fun run for that length of time.
Barry: So ten years ago, what did it look like when you launched it? What was the situation? How many of you were in a room? What did it look like to launch it? If someone was watching above, what would they have seen? What were you expecting ten years
ago?
Jim: We knew from ten years before, that this would work. The previous ten years we made more sophisticated kinds of games. We learned more about the interfaces. We invented bubblechat, although we didn't patent it unfortunately. We realized that another key component to kids' engagement, or human engagement, is the ability to customize things, make them your own. I realized that from my daughter. As a Caltech professor, I had the Internet to my house before most people knew the Internet existed, and so my daughter was on some of the first chat sites. I remember once it was dinnertime and I went in to talk to her and said, “Kate it's time to come to dinner”. She said, “Dad I can't because I've just been declared to be God of the chat site, and it took me a long time to become God and I don't want to leave it”. I said, “Kate (she was about twelve), you have to eat. Probably even God has to eat. But anyway, so you have to come eat”. She came and wolfed her food down, then went back to the computer. Ten minutes later, no one knew who she was. She went from God to nobody in ten minutes because there was no persistence. So I realized that another piece of these worlds would have to be the ability to have persistence that solely built up your personality, that built up your place in the world and built your reputation in the world that is very human primate type. So you knew all these things. The question was convincing somebody.
The initial question was in principle, in the late 1990's. There is a spectacular amount of money laying around to do interesting things on the Internet, most of which was spent on doing completely
uninteresting things on the Internet. We thought we were pretty interesting. Of course, it turned out we were too interesting, and it was very hard. I had very hard conversations with high levels of
people with a lot of money in very strong positions say this sort of structure is the ideal structure for not only kids, but humans of the Internet.
I remember one conversation with a major organization, which will go nameless, and the very top of that organization, whose name was recognized all over the world in the IT area. I presented this idea
to them and the response was that human beings are lazy and they have short attention spans, so this will never work. I said no no no. I think this was the first time I might have used the word
“engaged” in this context. I said, you know, it isn't about the number of eyeballs watching, it’s about how the brains attached to those eyeballs get engaged. They just denied that humans were like that, and I actually looked around the room and said “well that explains to me some of your products”. That was more or less the end of that conversation. Basically, we decided in 1999 to do it
ourselves. Four of us, we are all still with the company, decided to self-finance and watch it. We are now at 4.1 million, actually 4.5 million users. We made it to a million registered users with four people.
Barry: In how many years roughly?
Jim: It took us about six years to get to a million, and we are now over four million. Last year we added a million, so we are on an exponential curve.
Barry: I think about the time you hit a million, it was just about the beginning, and correct me if I'm wrong, about the beginning at the time that the term virtual world was being used to describe what you were doing.
Jim: That's right. Second Life has done wonders for us because it became a media sensation, and prior to Second Life, I had to explain what a virtual world was. Now I just have to explain that they are not all the same. Probably the most interesting thing that we are watching is that when we started, and even to this day with all the transitioning, most people still think about measuring the value of media, or the Internet, or some site on the Internet, primarily in terms of eyeballs. Otherwise known as number of unique visitors, or worse yet, number of registered users.
There is a transition happening now, clearly, where people are realizing that it's not only that they are there, it is how long they are there, and what they are doing. So engagement, which I now
refer to as the "E" word, everyone is talking about, and very few people know how to measure it. The multibillion-dollar question is, how do you monetize it? Our posit, ten years ago, we set out to
engage. We believed that looking at humans, things that humans are willing to engage in to the greatest extent, is learning, where the learning confers a social or economic benefit. That’s why as a
professor at Caltech, I can charge thirty thousand dollars a year for students to come in and let me torture them in exchange for which I give them a piece of paper. This would suggest that humans
value learning. Now at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where we charge less, we torture them to the same extent and they still end up with a piece of paper. There is some evidence that humans
value learning, and it's what they are willing to spend a great deal of their life doing.
What is interesting to watch now, and I think we're just at the threshold now, and research like Global Kids does, other organizations, especially funded by the MacArthur Foundation, that has been very much in the forefront of recognizing that this is a new venue and new opportunity and worth understanding at the research level, but also at the applications level, but you are now starting to hear Toyota or Disney, to some extent, the Getty Foundation, amongst others, realizing that there's an opportunity here with this technology to engage, that is connected to learning.
I think, to go back to the first question that you asked, ten years from now this transition will be complete, that the metrics that are used to monetize the Internet as a media thing, will be
engagement/learning metrics. Companies will be figuring out how to build learning around their products and when their products can't bear the scrutiny, might even change their products. Kids, there is already evidence for this, will be the most sophisticated in the human industry with respect to the texting dumb marketing and ignoring it and preferring to engage in consumer, student learner
centered marketing, sponsorship, advertising, learning, education, all as the same thing.
Not to sound too pie in the sky or sort of sparkly eye glasses, but having watched this now for almost twenty five years, and knowing something about primates and human behavior, that has the
potential, especially sitting in this room and looking at pictures of kids in Guyana, given its connectivity, it really has the potential to change the world. That's why we started this and added
fun to see some of the guesses we made along the way maybe start to pan out and it's going to be a lot of fun to watch the next ten years.
Barry: Jim I hope that in ten years from now, we get to talk about how we got to that place, what obstacles we had to overcome to get there, and I can talk about the next ten years from there.
Thank you for talking with us today.
Jim: Hope to be here. Thanks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This was a special podcast from RezEd. Join us for our next regularly scheduled podcast where we will speak with Constance Steinkuehler about World of Warcraft. See you then.
To return to this podcast's audio and shownotes, click here.
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