Craig Vezina Interview with Jacob Sherson and Janet Rafner, June 13, 2020

Jacob Sherson: Over the past five years we have established what we call ScienceAtHome which is the project that takes citizen science challenges into the form of games and brings it to the global audience not just for solving scientific challenges but also for bringing citizen science challenges into the classroom setting. And then in a broader frame of that we’ve established the Center for HyperIntelligence in which we actually sort of use these kinds of games and these kinds of interactions to probe the interface between human and artificial intelligence. So saying where is it that humans have unique skills that can sort of complement and supplement those problem solving abilities that we see with AlphaZero and DeepMind that it’s sort of on the growth side at the moment. And so apply this to various different sectors and for instance thinking about what does it mean for hyperintelligence to be efficient in educational settings to merge the best of the human work with the best of the algorithmic work and the synergy in between both.

Janet Rafner: For our organization it’s important to examine these twenty-first century skills, social and emotional skills, these complex nuanced softer skills through the lens of hyperintelligence. So how will they change or adapt as we see increasing growth in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence. So how will those human skills or what we find to be necessary prominent human skills change as we look at it through the lens of artificial intelligence.

Craig Vezina: Excellent. Thank you for that and we’ll definitely come back to those human skills. So maybe a good place to start is do you think this is in the moment with COVID and the way that education has been disrupted where educators should be thinking about fixing the traditional ship or building a new ship?

Jacob Sherson: That’s a really great question.

Janet Rafner: Without any easy straightforward answer.

Craig Vezina: Exactly.

Jacob Sherson: Yes, so it is a good question but I was in a panel a few months ago on the future of education and there were some leading AI representatives, AI companies and they sort of more or less said that if their products could displace the teachers then the teachers really deserve to be disrupted. And I noticed in the room there was a round of applause and there was really this sort of atmosphere of we really need to rethink and we need to build an entirely new ship of education. And I really disagree with that very strongly because I think this is not only wrong. I also think it’s dangerous to think of it this way because I sort of interrupted them and I said I really think that you should sort of think a little bit more differently about this because what technology is doing and what it is doing is that they’re sort of picking the lowest hanging fruits in terms of what we can optimize. And if we end up focusing only on those parts of the education system we’ll be much less rich. I think it’s really crucial to use this time now to go back and think about critical thinking, abstraction, social, emotional learning. Those things that we don’t put into the computer systems and use the occasion now of the growth of technology to see how we can actually merge the capabilities from technology with all of the things that we have learned about education over the past decades and centuries. So I don’t think that we need an entire new ship. We really need to make sure that we don’t abandon ship and build on top of the things we know are working in the past.

Craig Vezina: Janet, do you want to speak to that one?

Janet Rafner: Yeah, I mean I echo a lot of what Jacob said. Additionally if we talk about things that we could change or we could fix with the system I think that displacing the teachers is the absolute wrong way to go. We need to provide the teachers with the right amount of training, support skills from other support staff that are whether it’s counselor’s, psychologists and then, of course, the tools to support the teachers in any period of time and how to adapt. Also, to teach teachers how to be resilient and adapt no matter what it’s going to look like whether it is a normal time with normal problems or a COVID time with COVID problems. And so I think that this idea that you can just hand a piece of technology or a computer or some device to students and expect it to solve age old problems is very wrong. But rather that we need to lift up our teachers. I’m from the States, also in the background in the States financially, academically we need to show them their worth and to make teaching to appreciate it for its critical nature in the development of our society.

Jacob Sherson: So very concretely we know that problem based learning, we now that inquiry based science education are sort of the crucial components of the twenty-first century. And we also know that this is happening with great success in many classrooms. It’s just also a big burden to sort of lay on the teachers the facilitation of it. So at the Center of Hyperintelligence our focus is really just to ask the question how is it that we can develop bits and software components, artificial intelligence to assist the teachers in managing the classroom, in bringing sort of their capabilities to the forefront and let’s say scaffolding the general population of all teachers to succeed where we know the most fortunate and most successful teachers are already succeeding at the moment.

Craig Vezina: Maybe we can build on that and just talk a little bit more about what that looks like when it’s done well. That sort of speaks to if we leverage technologies correctly question.

Jacob Sherson: Yes. So in our work what we are trying to do is to develop these tools that facilitate not just sort of the learning of the particular learning components but facilitate sort of in the spirit of inquiry science education sort of a journey of the students to enter all parts of the scientific research cycle. And so on a higher education level I had a very fantastic experience a couple of months before the COVID happened. In my course there was a fourth year advanced quantum mechanics course which is usually very dry, very technically minded and mathematically minded and we ran a test of one of our new software components which is called SciNote which is a sort of scientific notebook that enables the students to not only combine the – I’ll take that again. We developed what we call the SciNote which is a scientific notebook and this is a notebook or software environment in which we can take some of our games and visualizations and embed that into a classroom activity. So that allows us to sort of move away from the dry mathematical topics and the discussions and into sort of problem solving and open ended discussions. And we did that on my fourth year course and it was a great success because the students were really motivated by we give them an open ended challenge and not only were they using the notebooks collectively attacking this challenge and helping each other, but we also build into features of discussions.

So that they could actually reflect now. So they reflect on their actions and collectively reflect and write sort of synthesize a report of their findings. So this is sort of a way of rethinking how some of the activities that I might have been able to run before and be facilitated by educational technology because it just gives that scaffolding for the fruitful interactions so that I as a teacher don’t have to hold onto the reins and sort of let this peer instruction flow but also within some boundaries that are already set out. And after that we have a review section with the students and the students were sort of just amazed because in their 20 years or 15 years of education they have never done something that took all these dry mathematical topics and made it actionable and made it entertainment and at the same time very reflective and very sort of engaging. So that was what I think was one of the moments where we were very proud and happy…

Janet Rafner: Just a couple more notes on SciNote. It’s a collaboration and creativity support tool that’s meant to facilitate the process of scientific reasoning throughout a spectrum of different projects that are not doing specifics. So the tool can be used many, many different settings. And it is to facilitate collaboration and meta reflection and understanding of hypothesis formation and falsification. So when you can collectively either in an in person room everyone is doing it on their own computer or tablet it can be used on any platform. Or in separate spaces so they don’t have to be together in the same room. It’s to be discussing a problem through many different angles both a strategy as well as being able to visualize and input the data directly into the tool as well as to meta reflect. And I agree with Jacob that I think this meta reflection process is one of the critical aspects that often gets lost in teaching environments. So this time that you can reflect on your own solutions or your own process of finding solutions as well as those of your peers and that’s often very labor intensive for a teacher to facilitate. And so through the tool we are testing the ways in which we can assist the teacher in facilitating that meta reflection process.

Jacob Sherson: Really there’s a conceptually a big space between what we talked about AI and AI more or less taking over and running the classroom and then saying if we want collaboration inside of the classroom today the tool of choice may be the Google Docs or the Teams or something like that where you have a structured interaction and you have possibilities of collaborating but you don’t really have possibilities as an individual teacher of changing that form of the interaction. And so that’s what we’re trying to explore sort of what is the future of software in educational settings. The future is that it’s sort of like the Linux system where it’s pretty easy to add a new functionality. So every individual teacher can either by themselves or in collaboration with someone who’s a little bit technically minded add features and then support that – make abilities to support what their classroom education. I think that is going to be the future of how technology is going to facilitate teachers in doing what they already want to do and already can do on the best of days.

Janet Rafner: I agree that malleability is key because I think one of the issues with ed tech in general is that it can be so fixed and the creators of the technology don’t know the nuances of a classroom and the particular context. What teachers need to adapt for students with different learning needs, different learning styles and exactly this case we’re experiencing now going from in person to virtual learning. So a key aspect that we are exploring within this ed tech realm is the malleability and the easy changes that a teacher can make to adapt the tool to their specific needs and to the specific needs of their students.

Craig Vezina: Sorry, can you hear me? Sorry, my computer froze. I want to dig into that a little bit. The students that are currently like with SciNote for example that are currently using are these university age students? And so the question really is in terms of younger students are you seeing this working as well. And then another question is mathematics seems to make a lot of sense in terms of an initial use case for this but have you also seen it applied to other subjects?

Jacob Sherson: We recently ran a test also in the tenth grade on a completely different topic. So we ran a test in the tenth grade which was having us cross over broad strokes of history.

Janet Rafner: So Jacob, how old are those students? Thirteen?

Jacob Sherson: Fifteen.

Janet Rafner: Fifteen.

Jacob Sherson: So we have 15-year-old students in a broad strokes course on what are the tendencies of world history. We asked a very open ended question to them in a workshop format in which we said historically sort of the Western culture became dominant throughout the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s and what is the reason for that or what are the reasons for that. And so then we asked them to explore that. We gave them a little bit of literature to start out with but then we just sent them out exploring and the using SciNote the had to go through a fairly structured process in which they first had to have the cap of being factfinders. They went out. They found facts and they reported back inside of SciNote and then they had a phase in which they were synthesizing. They were putting together strings of arguments for logical consistency. And in that framework we taught them both how to scientifically argue so that is put together a scientific relevant string of arguments but also at the same time how to do scientific communication in the sense that we within the SciNote also had them citing the previous works. So they cited each other that had all those facts. And then in the next phase we told them to put on a cap of reviewing this critically and saying okay, what are the kind of questions that we could ask to the hypothesis that you are now formulating based on the data and continually asking why could that be and trying to show how in the process of sequentially asking why is that, pick out more and more fundamental reasons and root causes of something happening.

And they synthesize that and the idea is that we could then present them in the end of such a lecture, we could sort of present them with the tree of knowledge that they had generated in which you saw the fruitful hypothesis that were growing. You also saw that some point effect appeared that disproved a hypothesis that sort of became a paradigm that died and then the tree kept on growing. And that way we can digitally also facilitate a meta reflection process afterwards in which they sort of continually discussed together what kind of process they went through and bring sort of a bigger discussion about what is the nature of science and how does knowledge creation actually work in the real world. And so the nice thing about this was of course it was chaotic because it was one of the first attempts of trying this out, but afterwards – and we didn’t know okay, so were they happy with this. But the teacher afterwards said can I use this tool for some other things afterwards. And so that was the biggest credit that we could get when we’re developing these kinds of things. Even though it’s chaotic and even though we’re trying and learning from this the teachers really found it useful and want to keep using it for these things. So we use this as trying to identify various different age groups and topics to test this out.

We see this as sort of exploring what kinds of digital tools can we develop to facilitate this sort of critical reflection and how do we need to structure an interface so that we can start to expand that out and scale it up to more schools and more countries.

Craig Vezina: How many students have – is it specifically SciNote or is SciNote one of several tools just for my own clarification.

Jacob Sherson: So SciNote is one of the tools that we’re developing in science. We have various different games. We have simulations or interactive simulations and then we have these meta reflection.

Janet Rafner: Cross cutting tools. So we had simulations and games that are more domain specific that are looking at particular problems, particular contexts. And then we have tools that can be used to facilitate this problem solving, collaboration and meta reflection throughout different disciplines and different contexts. So we were talking a little bit about SciNote first because it is that tool that can be used in many different context but I think that it’s also valuable to step back and talk a little bit more perhaps about our methodology is called research – or one of our educational methodologies is called research enabling game based education and that’s really a way in which we allow or facilitate participants, particularly students to be able to contribute to real world problems. So research problems that we scientist researchers are working on. We developed a game based interface to allow the students to participate directly in that research with us and then develop educational curriculum around that game so that there can be a direct tie to their core curriculum.

And we work very closely with teachers. We employ teachers as well at our organization and have an active discourse to make sure that all the work that we’re aligned is directly beneficial and relating to what they’re doing. So this regame mentality is aligned with the inquiry based science education that Jacob mentioned earlier, but it takes it almost one step further because in inquiry based science education often it’s a bit like a discovery role playing game. So the students are participating in activity but really at the end there is a known answer and there’s been a lot of research showing that how a student approaches problems when there is an answer and when there isn’t an answer is quite different. And so through this methodology of researching game-based education we are working to allow students or help them facilitate the process of them contributing to real scientific problems. And SciNote is that crosscutting tool that can be paired with each of these different domain specific games and educational tracks to facilitate those social skills of collaboration and also group meta reflection.

Jacob Sherson: In inquiry based science education you have the challenge to sort of there’s always sort of a dilemma that either you take a challenge which is very tangible and something that you can actually solve and then either it’s sort of a role playing game where it has already been solved or it’s not an extremely complicated thing or you try to be sort of **** be inspired by this and say let’s solve one of the greatest challenges that exists on earth and then it becomes sort of a little bit fluffy. Of course we can’t make real contributions or real solutions to these biggest of challenges. And this is where we see through games the use of citizen science to build the bridge between those classroom activities and then the actual sort of impact that you are making in the real world. Because they are engaged with real knowledge creation. And for us sort of the real work lies then in two things. One of them is to structure the activities so that the contribution becomes useful and possible. That means that we try to take those complex challenges, build them into games that are approachable by everyone without an educational background. And then the second challenge that we have when we do try to make it successful in the classroom which is just as important is to make it deeply connected with the core curriculum so that we can have attacking a real world challenge can be okay, we go out to a company or we go out to a research group and then we try to help them, but we didn’t really understand what the connection was to the core curriculum but we have now.

And then sort of builds a divide to say okay, I know that if I went through high school and college and university I could become a researcher but my core curriculum that I’m attacking right now is not really relevant for that. And we’re trying to turn it on its head and say how can we make a link which is very direct between the core curriculum that the students have at the moment in seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade and to those core challenges. One of the examples that we have in my lab is we have a quantum computer that we are trying to build. We have individual items and we try to move them around. When they move around then they slosh and they slosh a little bit like glass in a cup. That’s why we build analogies to a pendulum or a child on a swing. And then we say if you understand Newton’s equations then you can actually also understand sort of how you should manipulate those individual items that we have in the lab in order to make them behave the way we want it. That creates sort of a deep motivation we have seen for wanting to understand that. So we use our games to provide the motivation for learning what the curriculum components are. [00:21:49]

Craig Vezina: Just a few quick questions. Jacob, your background is in physics and Janet, yours?

Janet Rafner: So I have a background in both physics and in studio art.

Craig Vezina: Fantastic.

Janet Rafner: I moved to Denmark from the States on a Fulbright Fellowship to study how complex phenomena visually.

Craig Vezina: Okay. Do you also collaborate with schools of education?

Janet Rafner: Yes, we do and we have two learning scientists on our team as well.

Craig Vezina: Excellent.

Janet Rafner: So I’m not sure – I don’t think Jacob mentioned it. We are a diverse team of researchers in our core group so we range from psychologists, media psychologists, cognitive science, computational thinking, learning science, data science, physicists. So those are teachers of course also and then we also have game developers both front end and back end who work for us in our group to develop the products inhouse. So our games we develop at the university. And then we have, of course we couldn’t do everything ourselves so we also have large consortiums of researchers from around the world in different disciplines that are contributing actively on all of our projects. [00:23:06]

Jacob Sherson: So an example of that is one of the biggest challenges that we have at the moment with twenty-first century learning and education is really understanding these twenty-first century skills that people talk to much about. We need to teach them but we actually don’t completely understand what they are. I think that’s one of the things that may be missing in the popular perception of what the future of education is. It’s not a solved thing. We actually don’t from a scientific point of view and from a human point of view understand these skills very well. That’s one of the big areas of focus in our group in the consortia that we formed is to make a large scale effort to pick one of these twenty-first century skills and creativity. And then we’ve tried to build maybe the largest cohesive effort in the world to try to see if we can investigate creativity from many different angles. So systematically investigate that using this citizen science methodology where so far in our games we’ve had 300,000 people. We can actually learn a lot about human behavior if we can structure these and take them into the educational settings where they are relevant and then have massive amounts of data.

Not massive amounts of data sort of in the traditional way that are supposed to automize everything. But in order to start to unravel these human processes that are very subtle, that are sort of have so far a little bit alluded our description and our understanding because the traditional ways of investigating creativity, for instance is very situational and it’s very much depending on okay, you have a few people in a room collaborating somehow or solving a challenge and it has been sort of a question how can we actually scale it up so that we can get large amounts of data on that. That’s what we are trying to do at the moment. Take the learnings that are from intelligence based research where you have been trying to have what you call portfolios of investigation and scaling that up and then saying okay, what can we do if we take the efforts within creativity and combine them into a single package and then use the citizen science spirit to bring the entire world population into collectively trying to understand this phenomenon.

Janet Rafner: There are a couple of things I want to follow up on that description. One is very important. I forget if you already said it but it’s worth reiterating is that even though we’re doing this on an online digital platform taking a computational approach we are not aiming to reduce creativity down to one number because that is certainly not the way that it can be done. It is very contextual and complex and nuanced and so I don’t want the online effort to be misconstrued as one that thinks that it can reduce creativity down to a number and just to give it a little bit more perspective on what that consortium looks like of researchers we have researchers from cognitive science, from computer science, business and management as well as art history and aesthetics as well as philosophy and traditional creativity research. And it’s very important that we have that – and also learning scientists. Also important to have that broad spectrum and broad input as to how creativity is understood and assessed and valued in different contexts.

Jacob Sherson: So our approach is to make learning about creativity a journey. A journey in which we start to build the first parts of a house of understanding and then we test that and take our understanding into the real world and we found all the ways that we are wrong. All the things that we still don’t understand and then we iteratively sort of in an online massive investigation framework building effort we continually go back then to the individual setting to the small scale and test it out and see does it actually capture the things when an architect is really creative and does our framework maybe not from the point of view of saying okay, let’s validate that it actually does that but with the viewpoint of we’re going to fail the first ten iterations or something like that. But the we can gradually build a more and more sophisticated understanding of what creativity and other twenty-first skills really are. And that would sort of then also mean that when it’s embedded into large scale testing environments and in school settings it will not be construed as genesis as the number of creativity and that number of creativity has to go up because creativity and the other skills are really complex nuanced skills that also need to be taught in very complex and nuanced ways.

Craig Vezina: There’s so much about this that I find fascinating and I think is going to be fascinating to the series. First question. I love creativity as a concrete example. What would be a second concrete example of a human skill that you’re attempting to better understand?

Jacob Sherson: So, that’s a large portfolio of different – what we in our center try to look at is we view the future of education and work though the lens of hyperintelligence. We’re asking what are the most important hyperintelligence skills that we will have and computational thinking is one.

Janet Rafner: I also think – sorry to interrupt you Jacob. I think that complex problem solving is a very core example of something that’s at the heart of what we’re doing, especially in relationship to hybrid intelligence. So how do you take these complex problems whether or not you know the discussion of okay, it’s simple where there’s a known truth. And then it’s complicated and then it’s complex and then it’s wicked where the spectrum of not knowing even, coming to an agreement as to even what the problem itself is. And these are the issues that are critical in our society right now. Every single SDG outline is a wicked problem and so the work that we’re doing centering around hybrid intelligence is fundamentally trying to understand which parts of these complex and then the next level would be wicked problems should humans be doing and which part should algorithms be doing. And which part should we be studying humans individually solving versus individuals collectively solving. And so our work is really centered on trying to unpack and analyze the complexity of how these problems are solved between the humans and machines.

And we take citizen science or we’re using the term computational citizen science to explore some of these problems which I would say I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’re wicked but certainly complex and to understand how a digital scaffolding and how a citizen science methodology can facilitate that problem solving.

Jacob Sherson: We’re very inspired by one of the forefathers of AI, Herbert Simon, who also in an educational context more or less said every problem in the world is simple when you know the solution to it. And that is a very deep truth because it really illustrates that complex problem solving is just the ability to view the problem sequentially from different angles. And at some point you start to view it from an angle in which it just makes sense. All the pieces of the puzzle fit together. So one of the skills that we need to teach ourselves and our youth for the future is really that ability to change our viewpoint and view the problem from many, many different angles until the pieces fit together. And that is a question. How can we scaffold that interaction also digitally. For instance, when we combine that with knowledge of creativity when we are exploring different kinds of options we are in sort of a brainstorming phase. What kind of scaffolding and also digital scaffolding do we need to have in order to make a hybrid used as a human computer created interface that allows us to explore but also be facilitators in illustrating what the consequences are around new ideas. That’s sort of how we still see the different skills merging together and then when we start to move toward finding solutions and having alignment concepts such as social and emotional learning are going to be really crucial in finding out and understanding what kinds of key elements is it that we need to put together. And so that’s part of the global effort within the Karanga Consortium that we are also members of. First of all to understand what that is and to understand how that can be facilitated in the classroom and how that it can be scaled up so that it benefits all of the students in the world.

With game based and technology based education you always run the risk of the focus of the center of attention actually becoming the technology and the fascination with the technology. And that’s why maybe a little bit surprisingly we have sort of developed into sort of the much more human centered and much more **** in our focus of saying okay, what is it that’s important. It’s actually I think maybe one of the biggest surprises to me sort of in the last five years is the realization that technology has only become a mirror of showing how much we don’t know about what it means to be human. And so that means it’s not so much about utilizing the technology for the better of humankind. It’s actually utilizing technology to learn about what it means to be human and that is the biggest question that we have at the moment. So the underlying question is the question of authenticity in education. Authenticity and relevance and the cases that you mentioned, the low hanging fruits they are really in social and emotional learning. They are in taking the social perspective and seeing their viewpoint. You could say that we are sort of taking the first steps in another direction also which is this problem solving question.

We have some of the combinatorial questions and so when we attack those kinds of questions and ask what the physicality is of problem solving abilities and we’re not just asking questions about future education but also future of work and how are we going to solve complex problems individually and collectively. I think authenticity and the ability to change one’s viewpoint are sort of the key issues there.

Janet Rafner: Yes, I like that. The ability to change ones viewpoint. It reminds me of a quote I recently heard that says changing your mind is the best way to remind yourself that you have a mind. I thought that was a very interesting and I think that it can be very fitting for these types of activities where you can, especially in behavioral economics where you can see how people respond in different settings and we think at least in our work game **** is one step into it but of course there’s always the question of is it an endgame response or is it a real world response. And the ability to test it in a more immersive environment would certainly lower that threshold of understanding if it was a game response or a real world response.

Jacob Sherson: We had an interesting experience. There was a question about an inspiring story of a parent and I thought so one of the most inspiring stories that we have of a parent throughout my occupational time is at some point we had developed the first of our games and then we were contacted by a mother from Utah and she said that she had been working with her son and he had been going through our games, citizen science games and also our educational material around it and then he was a little bit stuck on one of the games called Quantum Shooter and didn’t really understand what the background of that was. I said okay, I’ll be happy to explain it to you. But it actually turned out that this guy said he was a second grader and so he was with his mother sort of exploring citizen science and games and education and learning. I thought that was really inspirational support. Not only that but that conversation sort of took off and he had a science fair project and for his science fair project he developed an entirely new activity around the game so the quantum game is about moving these sloshing liquids that are really atoms but then he invented an activity for his classmates in which they had these small cups of water and they had to run and systematically sort of over an entire day they sort of investigated different ways of running with liquid.

He noted all those results down and so in contact with him we transformed that into an activity that has been used in classrooms, has been used in science museums and in the next step Janet has been working on producing a prototype of a robot that can also do this but she can control it with a Wii and then you can have that physical interaction that could be potentially scalable in a science museum case. I thought that was really fascinating how that starts with the questions and the inquisition of both a young child but also of a supporting parent that really takes it and how games can be sort of the bridge across generations and across continents reaching out from Denmark and build these collaborations. So one of the most powerful examples of online learning and the power of combining the games with nontraditional learning environments is one of the optimization games that we had in citizen science so that was actually controlling my experiment, the physics experiment in the basement.

We gave control from people around the world to control the powers of the lasers and there was a system that none of them actually understood. But then we had lots of people who actually performed extremely well on this challenge and we were contacting some of these. And one of the was a retired microwave systems engineer from Italy and we talked to him and said okay, what is your thinking. What’s going through your mind when you are playing this game. And he said for him this experience of playing the game and optimizing our experiment was actually exactly like the experience of optimizing his microwave systems that he had been working on for 30 years because in 30 years he never really understood microwave systems. So what he realized was that through his 30 years he had built up this very domain specific skill, at least that’s what he thought but then playing our games he suddenly sort of made a reflective and said okay, all the experience that I’ve built up is actually useful in another context so maybe I’ve actually been learning something else that is much more profound. And I think that’s a good reminder that when we are talking about these transferrable skills then they are exactly transferrable and we should highlight on that and we should really teach the open mindset of saying you are learning something but you are learning it in one context and what we’re practicing is actually you being able to transfer that into a new context. And so that is going to be sort of very important and profound I think for the future of education, for the future of work and how we think about how we generate experience not just in an educational setting but in a corporate setting also and how we can share that experience with each other. And so that was very inspirational when we also gain insights about our tools when they are confronted with talking to the people who are playing with this and we learn a lot from this.

That returns a little bit back to the saying that by creating these interfaces we are generating learning not just in the people who are engaging with it but also profoundly in us because we are continually practicing phrasing our challenges in new ways. I think for the future research that is going to be, and development that’s going to be a really important skill to continue and to be able to change the viewpoint of our challenges and find out how do we need to represent it in order to make it solvable or easily solvable.

Craig Vezina: So this question of common language is I think critically important if we’re going to solve wicked problems. Are you using the SDGs as a framework or how are you developing the language that you use for framing these problems?

Janet Rafner: Yes, we are using the framework of the SDGs in our work and we are not just using the headlines but going into the indicators and in particularly it has a lot of relevance for the work that we’re doing in behavioral economics. And so we’re framing the discussions on shared resources, collaboration, things similar to prisoner’s dilemma. Also trolley problem, trying to understand at both computational thinking through making models but also through the lens of this how people collaborate and share resources. And even beyond that we have a partnership with the Smithsonian, in particular the Smithsonian Center for Science Education. They are working to develop in collaboration also with the Inner Academy Partnership. I think that’s what it’s called IOP. The Smithsonian Science for Global Goals modules which are education – that’s a mouthful – educational modules that are specifically designed around the SDGs. In particular to make community action plans and to provide educational material that can be used and understood globally and then adapt it locally to particular contexts.

And in our partnership with them we are working to incorporate our citizen science games into these educational modules. We have one now. We have a game called Corona Minister. That is centered around COVID-19 that has been included in the World Health Organization and the Smithsonian’s module on COVID-19 as well as we are working to integrate SciNote as that meta reflective tool to facilitate these community action guides across all of the educational modules within their science for global goals program.

Jacob Sherson: So one of the most profound insights that I personally have made is that understanding that around each of the SDGs there’s not just sort of a technical scientific question that needs to be solved because that’s also a socioeconomic question. That means that solving these problems really means deeply and profoundly understanding the viewpoint of everyone else and all of the different stakeholders and why they believe and take the actions that they do and this is where behavioral economics really becomes a common language for the understanding of how we can collectively solve these problems. So when we attack SDGs in educational context one of the things is that we really try to use our games as the way in to discussing some of the associated dilemmas that to each of the SDGs. And the Corona Minister game is at the moment sort of trying to unravel some of the questions that have not been discussed so much which is to say that one thing is the spread of the disease and understanding the spread of the disease and what we can do and which actions we can take. But another one is really sort of understanding on a high level, sort of a policy level what kind of tradeoffs is it that our Corona Ministers, our prime ministers and presidents are taking at the moment, the tradeoffs that they have to make between health and economics…

Janet Rafner: Public freedoms.

Jacob Sherson: Is really something that where we need if we want to drive a common understanding of solving and making these solutions then we also need to have a common understanding of the complexities of the more dilemmas and the tradeoffs that go into this. As this concept called a trolley problem which is this model dilemma whether you should kill one type of person or the other type or group of people and you could say that our Corona Minister game was designed as a huge sort of trolley problem to make the students reflect critically on how much of their individual privacy are they willing to give up for increased measures. One thing that we are trying to help achieve with this game is that students get an increased understanding of what the policymakers are actually thinking about and we’re thinking today if the students and the general population gained this understanding then it’s also much more likely that they are going to abide by the guidelines. The second thing is also something that in this new world of SDGs we really need also bottom up voices to be heard when we have these policies. Then we need to find out new ways of channeling the insights and the ideas and the preferences of the population for how to solve all of these moral dilemmas.

So in that way our game is sort of a way to shape and get thousands or millions of people to play these games, insert their own thresholds of what their best solution is and maybe feed that into the policymakers on a national global stage and then engage in that communication. I think that could be one of the pieces in the future but not that game but that approach this of bridging the gap of communication that could really be one of the key elements of gaming. So the magic wand that I think right now is sort of the alignment between all of the different stakeholders on the key questions that we have. And the key questions that we have when we’re talking about education is not technology and how to apply it, but to really understand what are the key factors that are working in our education system and ones that are not working and how can we make all stakeholders sort of align on understanding that and then build a solutions from there. And that requires a huge amount of coordination and also communication without being distracted. And there’s so many different things that can distract us at the moment when finding these solutions and I think that’s the magic wand to wave away all of the distractions to the real problems that we have.

In the sense that we need to be able to of course connect data. We need to of course be able to connect insights and motivations across but we also need on a policy level to connect the research arm and the lack of the complete understanding that we have at the moment. We have some discussions with policymakers at the moment and one of the biggest dangers that we see at the moment is sort of jumping the gun and saying that these future skills they can be measured, they can be understood and we just need to build the right kind of AI and technology in order to facilitate that solution. And that is at the risk of wasting a lot of money and taxpayers money. I was very shocked in India when I saw at this educational conference summit where there were companies that were doing cognitive profiling and they were so proud on stage showing it how their students were doing it and they were building their skills. Then I walk up to the CEO and I talked to him and ask what kind of psychological framework do you have for working memory and assessing that. He says ah, I use my gut feeling for that and that is sort of the wild West at the moment of teaching, fostering, measuring these kinds of twenty-first century skills. I think that’s what we are really trying for is to have some sort of coordination on what do we know and what don’t we know at the moment so that we don’t jump the gun and enter this Wild West territory.