Why Distance Learning?

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.842)
Hello everyone and welcome to why distance learning the podcast that challenges misconceptions about live virtual education hosted by three seasoned distance learning professionals, myself, Seth Fleishour, in addition to Tammy mooring and Alison Mitchell of the center for interactive learning and collaboration. Hello ladies.

Tami Moehring (00:18.508)
Hello!

Seth Fleischauer (00:19.296)
We bring you real stories, expert insights and research back strategies that uncover the true impact of distance learning in today's world. Today we're diving into a topic that often gets reduced to a single word, engagement, without unpacking what it really takes to build it. Our guest today, Ben Summers, has taken a bold dynamic approach. He's turning competition into community through live team-based academic games that students actually want to show up for. Ben is the founder and CEO of

Recess, great name, an online platform that turns virtual learning into an e-sports style experience complete with live commentators, scheduled games, and real time academic challenges. But Recess isn't just for fun and games. It's serious about belonging, identity, and student motivation. Let's explore how distance learning can be both rigorous and thrilling with Ben Summers. Welcome, Ben.

Benjamin Somers (01:12.301)
Thank you. What a great intro. Pretty fun.

Seth Fleischauer (01:13.696)
Tammy, could you tell us a little bit more about Ben?

Tami Moehring (01:18.85)
I'd happy to. So as you already mentioned, Seth Ben is the founder of Rhesus, a fast-growing platform where homeschoolers design their own education, connect with other families and learn real skills. He's building something radically different from school and experience powered by new technology, but grounded in timeless ideas, self-direction and mastery and community. Rhesus uses AI, complex simulations.

and adaptive learning tools that help kids move faster, learn deeper, and explore like never before. Before starting Recess, Ben helped to build Synthesis, born out of Elon Musk's experimental school, scaled startups to millions in revenue, and got fired three times at the same company for taking big swings. Now he's leading a team that's redesigning education into something where kids are creators, not just consumers.

Ben, your journey from teacher to startup founder is already a compelling one. What was the moment or the problem you couldn't stop thinking about that eventually became recess?

Benjamin Somers (02:24.742)
Oof. That's a good question.

Benjamin Somers (02:30.509)
I mean, think the big answer is it predates recess and it's kind of the reason I joined Synthesis. But it was that as a, know, I went through school and I didn't like school very much. I did find it and it went like a good university. But...

Benjamin Somers (02:48.323)
I didn't think the school cared about me at all as an individual or as like a person. They cared about me as another student, as like a contributor to the test scores. And if I did things that were good for me individually, but bad for the group, that was bad. That was a bad thing to do in school. And so think I just felt very frustrated by that always. I just, in honesty, I felt kind of like a prisoner.

Allyson (03:06.669)
Yes.

Benjamin Somers (03:14.637)
while was in school, like I got dropped off there at this time and I couldn't leave even I really wanted to leave and I couldn't go outside and all these things. And so I wanted to try and figure out how do I help kids feel more free and practice more of the skills I think they'll need in real life. That was kind of the fundamental thing. And a lot of it around feeling freedom as a kid and how that can like lead to independence as an adult. And so I started to work on that and I thought we would need a lot of things to make this future a reality. You'd need different sets of learning materials that are less prescriptive and more interactive.

right. need a system that actually tracks at the student level rather than the class level. There's all these kinds of like technical details that you'd need. but mostly I knew, I knew nothing about it. And, so I wanted to go learn from somebody and try to find the best person I could learn from. went and read all kinds of the old books from Montessori to Pappert to Dewey and kind of all these different people have thought about what education could be. but I wanted someone living to like hang out with and study from that actually knew what they were doing. And so I found this guy named Josh Don who had started this school at SpaceX.

Allyson (03:54.179)
You

Benjamin Somers (04:14.773)
where they taught the problem, not the solution, or the problem, not the tool. So rather than try and teach kids, you know, this is a wrench and this is what a wrench does, we're gonna teach them to try and take apart an engine. And then they're gonna ask us, hey, can I have a wrench? And then you can teach them about a wrench. And so that was kind of the core premise of that school, and I thought it was really great. And so I went to go work for him and tried to TA for him for a couple of years. And while I was working at Synthesis, I ended up kind of leading this product team and...

we were in an attempt to figure out how to make that product scale and that company scale. We were trying to remove humans from the loop, right? Because humans get in the way. They're complicated to scale. and I'm talking about that. is the perspective I think of synthesis. Yeah, it's tough to scale humans. And you can't train or work with or find the right people as fast as you can just sell a new piece of software. And as we started pulling out

Seth Fleischauer (04:53.824)
Hmm.

Tough to scale humans.

Allyson (04:59.715)
You

Benjamin Somers (05:13.581)
the different human parts, I started noticing the kid's interest drop off a cliff. And meanwhile, the materials were getting better. The games were getting better. The digital tutor was getting better. The voice to speech model was getting better. The widgets were getting better. The explanations are getting better. And the kid's motivation was going down and down. And I was kind of like surprised by this. And this is what led me to this port, is, I think we, which is what the foundation of recess is.

Seth Fleischauer (05:17.888)
Hmm.

Benjamin Somers (05:43.361)
I think we are deeply, deeply social creatures that love to be around other people, to work with other people, and ultimately to give value to other people. And I think even if you're like kind of a pessimistic person who says it's all status games, everyone's fighting for status, what is status? You know, if you break it down, it's usually some, you earn status by doing things that, you know, you win awards.

You make some new product, you build some business, you get some sort of job that is like very hard to do. And all of these things are proxies for, know, how much value did you give back to other people? And, uh, and I think this matters a lot to us. When I think back about my own childhood and education, you know, I never liked writing papers because I couldn't tell who it was for. Was it for my teacher who didn't care about grading it or for my parent who didn't even know I was doing it? Or is it for me who didn't want to write it or my friends who were never going to see it? Like, who is this work?

Like, why am I doing this? And other things like, you know, I was a tiny kid, I made a paperclip necklace and gave it to my mom and make her cry. And then I made her like hundred paperclip necklaces. Turns out there's diminishing returns on making your mom paperclip necklaces. But I've cracked the code. I'm infinite value to society. just keep making my mom the same necklace over and over again. And yeah, and I had this realization that like that's the reason we all do what we do is because we like to...

Seth Fleischauer (06:50.624)
Yeah, like I've cracked the code

Benjamin Somers (07:08.409)
They like to be valuable, be entertaining, be useful and work with each other. so Recess kind of is, is even though we're super into tech and like spend a lot of our time on engineering and think about that, it's all built around this idea of what if education was like very human centered and very community centered and these tools and things all supported that. And so very long answer, but that is what Recess is kind of setting out to do is give kids access to much, much better tools than they've ever had before.

and tie them back to reasons to care, like working with other people.

Seth Fleischauer (07:42.92)
Yeah. And that, that reason to care is, is really clear when you talk about this stuff, you're talking about, forging an identity within a group, right? not just, being there to show up and fill a seat, but to have some real meaning to what you're doing. I do wonder how the why and how the philosophy actually translates into what you're actually doing with recess. Maybe we could back up a little bit there and can you just describe for a typical user that coming in, what is the experience like?

Benjamin Somers (08:08.097)
Yeah.

Benjamin Somers (08:12.313)
Well, it's about to change a lot. So it's going to change come August 15th, September 15th, up until now, you basically join the community and then you find your spot second. So it works a little bit like college. You like go to college and there's an orientation and you join, you know, an orientation group, bunch of other kids who were just starting that week. And there's like, you know, club field days where you walk around and everyone's got different booths. And ours is like in a virtual world. So you actually walk around and you talk to different people.

Allyson (08:13.731)
Yay!

Benjamin Somers (08:41.905)
And you see which groups you mesh with and which projects excite you. then you go join, you ask, and then you ask your parents for that class, that club. You know, we don't draw the distinction so much between them, but. So you go around and find people you like and things that you're interested in doing. And then you ask your parents to enroll in that and they can say yes or no. And so there's no such thing as a kid not being, being in a class they don't want to be in. And there's no such thing as a kid being in a class their parent doesn't value. Both.

boxes get checked for every registration. And yeah, so you join an orientation, and then we show you how to use all the different features. You add a few friends on the platform. You can message each other. And you sign up for your first adventure, which might be a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It might be building your own world in Minecraft. It might be launching. If you're a little bit older, it might be launching your own YouTube channel. And so you figure out what your first kind of quest adventure will be.

And in the future it'll change a little bit, but that's how it works now.

Allyson (09:41.059)
So we get to stay tuned for all of the fun features that are coming up. So that sounds really fun. I really love the philosophy that you have behind it, the idea of thinking about what you can do to have students really intrinsically participate, where they're learning these awesome skills, but also feeling that agency. And as I mentioned prior to us recording, having the parents in there as well, thinking about them because it is that mutual effort.

Benjamin Somers (09:46.999)
Yeah.

Benjamin Somers (10:00.985)
Mm-hmm.

Allyson (10:09.015)
so I wonder when you're talking about all of the play, for those that may be not as into e-sports or into gaming as much as, as some of us here may be, I wonder what the, if you could talk a little bit about what the engagement feels like in the virtual spaces and communities that you put together and how that, can structure a strong connection between spoo, students, especially if they're not sitting in the same space, in the same physical space.

Benjamin Somers (10:36.397)
Yeah. Yeah. All of our stuff is virtual. There are a lot of meetups, like a bunch of kids met up in Toronto yesterday. The pictures just got hit my, it was so cute. It was so fun. Yeah. What does it feel like? I mean.

Allyson (10:44.935)
Yay!

Seth Fleischauer (10:47.483)
Thank

Allyson (10:48.387)
love it so much.

Benjamin Somers (10:57.291)
A little bit like this, where sometimes you go through life and you have these things that you're obsessed with and excited about, and you don't always have a ton of people right next to you that are obsessed and excited about the same things as you. And it can be like euphoric when you end up in the room with all those people. And I think it's like that, you know, if there's some kid who's like crazy into building computer chips and Minecraft, which is a thing, there are kids who are super into that.

Allyson (11:24.866)
Yeah?

Benjamin Somers (11:27.169)
It's uncommon. And when they find someone else who nerds out like that, it's usually pretty fun. And so I think that's what it feels like. Yeah, it's like you find your people and we try to route you to your people. then, yeah, you voice call and hang out and maybe you organize a meetup in person with your parents or something.

Seth Fleischauer (11:46.432)
And so is it that that matter of of is it the choice the agency is that what really drives it here and gives it that sense of identity? Right. Like, I mean, you talk about you've said that recess is like a multiplayer game, right? Not just like delivering curriculum. So I'm thinking about like how to approach this from the from the point of view of a given teacher. Right. Like who doesn't necessarily have like software development money. Right. But like, how can they get their students to pay more attention? Like what have you learned?

Benjamin Somers (12:00.152)
Yeah.

Benjamin Somers (12:07.832)
Yeah.

Yes.

Seth Fleischauer (12:16.412)
about how you engage students that brings that sense of identity of agency of purpose into your platform and how platform and how can how can it be generalized to education in general do you think

Benjamin Somers (12:32.503)
Oof, I might have an unsatisfying answer to this.

Allyson (12:35.551)
Never know.

Benjamin Somers (12:37.561)
Which is I think it is really hard to overcome the student not choosing to be there. And that's just a really hard thing to overcome. And a lot of the reason our stuff works the way it does is because they all choose to be there. And they choose actively and consistently. And they can drop out and drop back in. And we view it as our job as an educator to win their time.

to make it so exciting, so valuable, so interesting, to make the progress felt by the kid. They can feel themselves getting better at a skill to a degree where they keep coming back. And then we built good metrics and analytics internally to surface how well they're doing that to the teachers. So our platform is kind of open-ended. People can come and teach their own subjects and topics. It's mostly on games, but it's open-ended.

We have one rule, which is it must be better taught on a computer than in person. So you can't teach guitar, but you can teach 3D modeling. And you could teach.

Seth Fleischauer (13:39.008)
Hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (13:45.012)
Although we've had a podcast episode about how to teach guitar online, but anyway, go on.

Benjamin Somers (13:49.971)
No, right. if you wrote us a compelling reason for why you thought you could do it better, you could sync the playlists across both screens, or you could do this, then we'd be interested in that.

Allyson (13:50.531)
You

Seth Fleischauer (14:01.682)
Yeah. How do you evaluate that? Right. I mean, it's a great guiding principle, but how do you evaluate whether something is better taught online?

Benjamin Somers (14:08.857)
Also unsatisfying, the answer is taste. just kind of we like, experience the class and hang out there and make judgment calls. I don't know if we have like a, you know what, you see it, yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (14:15.712)
You know it when you see it.

Allyson (14:19.307)
Yeah. Now we were talking about that the last episode too with Dr. Tova where we were saying the ideal critic, we could go down like who is the ideal critic? Who was the first person to say that they were the ideal critic and that fun philosophical moment. And it's a lot of understanding that you know will work and sometimes you need to draw that criteria for you to really speak to the high quality experiences that you're putting out for individuals to participate in. And I wonder if you could share just a little

Benjamin Somers (14:29.058)
Yeah.

Allyson (14:46.165)
a couple examples of some of the scenarios that individuals can jump into. I know you said some of the Minecraft, like being able to build up with some of the platforms, but how does it work? Is it single player? Do we have multiplayer? Cause sometimes play when we were talking to Alan from the co-lab, he's so, like, you know, it's always fun to talk about education and play. And competition sometimes comes into that playful.

Benjamin Somers (14:52.333)
Yeah.

Benjamin Somers (15:01.751)
Yeah, collab? Yeah.

Allyson (15:10.655)
experience when learning. So I wonder if you could share a little bit about what it could look like as a user.

Benjamin Somers (15:17.497)
Yeah. I mean, it's, there's a lot of variants because it depends on what you're doing. But, um, yeah, like example classes are, or example experiences are you, know, Kerbal space program is that's probably also. Oh, it's great. It's all the space X interns and a bunch of the NASA interns. all play it to like get their chops, but it's basically a physics lab where you can design rockets and launch them and try and get to other planets and things. And it's super realistic. Um,

And like, if you want to go do orbit or do some of these things, you have to like actually do orbital mechanics and math in order to figure out where to go. And so an example of this is, you know, there's a challenge to land on the moon and that's not competitive, but kids want to get it. And you know, there's some, they get certain rewards and whatnot for doing it both on recess and in the game. And so they will, they could sign up for a class taught by, there's a couple of different ways for them to figure out how to do this. One is they can sign up for a class taught by a great expert.

Seth Fleischauer (15:54.417)
awesome.

Benjamin Somers (16:17.059)
who will coach them through it. And we will actually match them with all of the requisites they need. So they might not just need a rocket design class, they might also need a math class that covers quadratics. And so for whatever the kid's kind of challenges is, we'll try and break down what are the core skills you're gonna need for that, and then put you in the right classes to develop those skills. The other is a little bit different.

And it's this like internal jobs board we have. So the kids are earning currency for the different challenges they have. And we tend not to sell status items or, or aesthetic products. Like, you know, you get a new profile picture, whatever. Instead you like get resources that help you do more of the things you love. So you can get open air cards, but so you can post a job saying, teach me how to land on the moon, or you could post a job saying, you know, be the chief engineer to land on the moon.

Seth Fleischauer (16:45.536)
Hmm.

Allyson (16:48.383)
Yes.

Seth Fleischauer (16:59.747)
cool.

Benjamin Somers (17:09.721)
and hire other kids to help you do those things. And so they can, it's pretty fun. So they self-organize. Those are two ways. One, you take a class to learn the skill through direct instruction, or two, you can participate in the job economy and get other kids to do it or teach you.

Seth Fleischauer (17:12.842)
Ha

Allyson (17:13.509)
Allyson (17:25.859)
Oh my gosh. I love that so much, especially the job economy experience, because with math, know, one of the big things you have to learn is really how to survive in the world. And you wonder a lot, especially in math curriculum, how does that become fun? How do you make that part of your, just like as you grow into adult, your everyday life, you have to consider what are you doing? What's this going to be? So that is really fun to think about. I am...

just breaking down all of the Assassin's Creed in my mind and how there are so many educational elements there where you can work independently and as a team. But maybe we can talk about that at a different time because there's so many different layers that are built into video games or into gaming experiences, whether they're video game, board games, play experiences that you're making up. So being able to encourage students in their free time to think about what they need to pass the challenge because

Benjamin Somers (17:58.862)
Yeah.

Allyson (18:20.045)
You know, it could be as the 10,000 steps, right? Like it's a random little token you get on your phone, but for some reason you're like, I must get this token. I must achieve it. And so whatever drives you, it's helping them like really identify their motivation. Like how do you get that motivation and then cultivate it? It's really fun models.

Benjamin Somers (18:26.104)
Yeah.

Benjamin Somers (18:37.709)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It's gonna be recognized when you achieve something.

Seth Fleischauer (18:43.552)
Yeah, people like that in general, I would say.

Allyson (18:43.681)
Yeah, it is.

I also like checking off the maps of the game sometimes, like, got this, got this. Yes.

Benjamin Somers (18:51.885)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (18:52.704)
I love a good check mark. Oftentimes I'll add something to my to-do list after I've done it just so can check it off and say that I've done it for sure.

Allyson (19:00.087)
Yes.

Benjamin Somers (19:01.175)
I did my laundry yesterday and I was like, I gotta check for that.

Allyson (19:04.299)
Yeah. Do you know a fun, I just learned a fun, this is to Valerie who also was on our podcast from USDLA. She said you should put on your to-do list to make a to-da list every day. So you can to-da your, make sure to remember what you did in a to-da fashion. Yeah. Small goals.

Seth Fleischauer (19:19.904)
I that. I want to get into the real-time participation element of this. A lot of education, it's almost like you're laying out a path in a four-dimensional space to travel along this path. And maybe there are certain forks along the way, but generally the destination is somewhat

Benjamin Somers (19:20.409)
Pretty good.

Benjamin Somers (19:36.174)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (19:45.056)
prescribed and the role of all the people in it are somewhat prescribed. Whereas like what you're talking about is there's something more in the moment, right? It's like moment based. Yeah. And so I wonder if you could speak to that in terms of why that matters for this type of learning.

Benjamin Somers (19:55.607)
Yeah, it's very spontaneous.

Benjamin Somers (20:07.385)
Benjamin Somers (20:12.547)
For all, I think there's two kind of meta skills to get really good at. One is how to master something, which will include doing lots of things you don't wanna do and that are difficult to do. And the second is figuring out what you wanna master.

Seth Fleischauer (20:26.875)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Somers (20:34.177)
And I think school is actually, you know, as much of a kind of school haters I am, I think it's actually like decent at the first one. I think it misses in a couple of places, like it, because it lays everything out for you so explicitly. All it really teaches you is how to do deliberate practice and apply yourself consistently and have good discipline. Whereas I actually think figuring out how to say, I want to get a five on the AP test, or I want to learn about this subject to learn how to break that down into smaller tasks is.

actually very difficult. And people have done a lot of pre-thinking for you. And so I think that's good because for school topics, you want to get the kids to master them as fast as possible. We know it's not chosen. We want to give them nice, efficient frameworks for it that can rapidly upscale. But I think that second thing of knowing what to master and knowing how to break that down into smaller tasks is really critical. And I think if you want to practice that skill, the only way to do it is just to be in the chaos and

have not a lot of instructions and to figure it out. And we try and train the kids setting goals, figuring out what they want, being intentional about what they would like to do. But so I think it has to be a little bit spontaneous because if you're exploring a new field, you have to try something and then try another thing and then try another thing and course correct about what's most interesting to you and then

plan two weeks ahead instead of 10 minutes ahead. And kids start recess, it's peak spontaneous. Like they really are just like running around doing anything. And then by year two, they've got like a six month goal they're working towards that dictates almost all their time. And so, you know, it's that part.

Allyson (22:17.207)
Mm.

Seth Fleischauer (22:22.272)
Is the establishment of that six month goal? Is that the type of thing that you see and you realize this is working? Because we talked about you mentioned like you go into a room and you know when you see it right in terms of like whether or not a certain skill makes more sense online. I imagine it's a little bit more complicated than that right like and you're we're we've been talking about this whole time is engagement. I think anybody what can walk into a room and understand if people are engaged or not.

Benjamin Somers (22:36.419)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (22:49.522)
just by seeing eyeballs focused on like a certain thing, right? For some people, that's it's as simple as that. And then you also talked about having advanced metrics where you're understanding whether or not you're you are winning the battle to compete for their time. But then this idea of like a six month goal, that's not going to be captured in in your metrics necessarily, right? Your software metrics. Like, and the more general question is, how do you what do you look for to know that this is working?

Benjamin Somers (22:50.051)
Yes.

Benjamin Somers (22:55.001)
Totally.

Benjamin Somers (23:21.145)
Yeah, there's two answers for it. Again, one is we're coming out with this new product in August 15th, September 15th, which I'm really, really excited about. It is much bigger than anything we've built thus far. It is an AI powered browser for kids that does lots of interesting things, like makes the internet much safer by safeguarding and having an agent running in the background deciding when content is harmful or doesn't match parental values and kind of pushing that out.

And then two, it can track your progress across different sites. So for homeschoolers, this is going to be a long answer to your question. It can track all their academic progress. We can figure out what are they spending their time doing. And anything they want logged for that can be done in the browser. And anything they don't want logged in that can be done on Google Chrome or whatever. So it's not like we're kind of.

the watching everything the kids are doing on the internet, only the things that may be related to their academics or their education. And so the short answer is the way we will measure it in the future is by like time and progress spent working towards big goals that they've explicitly stated and told an AI about. And we'll actually be able to kind of know like, they spent 40 hours trying to figure out watching YouTube videos, making their own art.

Seth Fleischauer (24:20.544)
Hmm.

Benjamin Somers (24:45.177)
on how to make a, you know, do a great animation. And like, here are all these different things they've been doing in their free time, exploring that all bubble up to this idea of they want to make a three minute animation film. And so that's one way we can figure is like, how are they spending their time on what materials are they spending their time, how quality those materials. Today, we don't have those like micro ones. We basically talk to the kids about what their goals are and then check in back in with them.

Allyson (24:57.101)
Hmm.

Benjamin Somers (25:14.369)
every couple of weeks about how they're progressing towards them. And it's very human oriented. It will always be very human oriented. We'll just have an AI helping us have, know, so the kid doesn't have to like write us a summary of everything they did that day, which no kid would want to do, but they can still keep their mentor updated.

Seth Fleischauer (25:35.22)
Got it. Yeah. Do you think, do you think you're losing some value in that, that reflective piece though? Like in terms of them not like, reflecting back on what they did that day and then no kid wants to do that. But do you see value in that, that you're giving up by allowing them to, to only spend time working on the problem?

Allyson (25:35.907)
to.

Benjamin Somers (25:56.985)
Do you have, you use any AI meeting summary things? Have you used these? I use granola. I don't know if you guys have tried that one. And after my meeting, it gives me like a outline summary of everything I did. It's amazing. I've never gone back after a meeting and made an outline summary of everything I talked about, even if it was like highly valuable for me to come up with action steps and to think about the structure. And then now that I get the one ping to me, I will often go through and edit it and be like, oh,

Seth Fleischauer (26:00.474)
Yeah, yeah.

Allyson (26:04.087)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (26:09.256)
It's... yeah, it's nice. Yeah.

Benjamin Somers (26:26.317)
that line is wrong, that line was wrong. no, actually this was the most important thing. I'll sort it at the top. And so I actually think like these tools that remove some of the drudgery and cognitive complexity of keeping track of what you're doing actually, for me, they increase the amount of time I spend reflecting on a meeting, if done right. And so that's, think the hope for this is it actually makes it easier for the kid and like gives them a jumping off point and it prompts them.

to think about that you just browse the web for two hours. Like what happened? And so this I think will be like a really easy like, here's what you did. And then, and maybe that like sparks an extra moment of, hey, was that the right way to use a computer? Is that how would I want to achieve with a couple hours?

Allyson (27:01.922)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (27:09.6)
Yeah, yeah. So having more accurate information gives you the opportunity to potentially to reflect more deeply on what happened. Yeah.

Allyson (27:12.227)
I think.

Benjamin Somers (27:17.591)
Yeah, but I think that's a good point and a good, with all of the AI tools, I think it's a big risk that they remove the intellectual burden, the cognitive burden from you and you atrophy as a result because you don't, you're not using that muscle. I think that's a risk across all of them.

Seth Fleischauer (27:29.312)
Yeah. And I guess for sure. And we'll find out in a decade or two how it went.

Allyson (27:36.001)
Yeah. Well, it's interesting how you're pairing it though with the idea of play and gaming and how that also then goes off into like the digital age and how are you being a responsible digital citizen? Like thinking about digital wellness, because as you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, the more that you remove the human element, the less it becomes authentic to the individuals that seem to be using it. And I guess I'm kind of...

Benjamin Somers (27:36.471)
Yeah, I think.

Allyson (28:02.851)
I know that it's in a virtual realm, but I am also thinking about recess as like the physical recess that, know, in middle school sometimes all of a sudden you're not allowed to have anymore. And it is a year where like you get like this weird like 20 minutes of something, but you're like, can I go outside and breathe the fresh air for a little bit in some situations? But it is interesting because I think about how do those patterns develop with students in person that we're seeing here virtually that in some cases you're gonna have students that are going off and

Seth Fleischauer (28:08.873)
Hmm.

Allyson (28:30.817)
socially connecting in different ways or playing sports that they wouldn't normally be playing. And then maybe they're not saying, I have a six month goal that I'm going to make this basketball hoop this many times, but for six months, they're going to be the ones that are like picking up the basketball, going and playing basketball game wanting and setting those self goals. So it's interesting. How do you track that in person the same way you're working to track it virtually? So with the AI, it's interesting is it.

Benjamin Somers (28:46.488)
Yeah.

Allyson (28:58.145)
looking at it as a tool, how that can help build more understanding of the inter and intra-personal relationships that students build.

Benjamin Somers (29:05.785)
I don't know the in-person. Yeah, my answer to the in-person stuff is like, we've definitely said we're just gonna try and figure out how to use computers to be the best bicycles to the mine, the best tools possible. And we think like they've gotten a bad rap because there's people have made them to do distract you and sell you a bunch of different goods. And so we think they stink. And in reality, we're just kind of like, you using them wrong. I don't know the in-person question is a hard one.

Allyson (29:28.459)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (29:31.466)
you

Allyson (29:31.651)
Well, because then if you take it to the recess element too, the question would become who would be the observer and the same question of subjectivity comes in. Or is that something that can be tracked or is it a subjective response? So it's interesting how the computer, like you said, can really be used as a vehicle to learn more and give us more about how students are interacting. Because sometimes, you we are all human, so you can at least tell how everything's working. Sometimes the computer can help us learn more about our...

Benjamin Somers (30:00.025)
It can like give us, I think it can give us more information and it can provide really good simulation environments for you to like learn things. But I think the answer is it's ultimately up to the parent. That like broadly school has missed this also. That they don't really involve parents enough in how they want their kid to be educated. And that, least me, I think it's like part of your, I think that's like a very human right to.

Allyson (30:08.098)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (30:15.872)
Hmm.

Benjamin Somers (30:27.385)
to have a lot of influence over how your kid grows up and what cultural values they take on and whatnot. so I think the goal is if you can use these tools to help parents understand their kids better, to follow the work that they're excited about, to sometimes translate for them. Like, your kids really into Minecraft, what does that mean? What are they doing in Minecraft? Are they like just killing zombies all day? Are they like building machines?

Seth Fleischauer (30:50.176)
Thank

Benjamin Somers (30:55.589)
and help if parents can like make better sense of their kids screen time, their kids will have a little more freedom. They'll be a little bit closer to their parents. They'll have common language and maybe the parents can have more of a influence over what their kids study or do.

Seth Fleischauer (31:02.186)
Hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (31:08.734)
Hmm. Well, one thing we love to do on the podcast is to keep the conversation going. We had your friend Alan Tong on the podcast a few episodes ago. He is how we got connected. Thank you, Alan. Tammy, could you please bring in a quote from Alan?

Benjamin Somers (31:18.286)
Yeah.

Allyson (31:22.285)
Thank you.

Benjamin Somers (31:22.393)
Thank you, Alan.

Tami Moehring (31:26.254)
I'd love to. Alan said, we're not limited by the laws of physics and distance learning. That means we can design experiences that would be impossible in a traditional classroom. So Ben, with that in mind, how does this quote resonate with you and your work at recess?

Benjamin Somers (31:26.553)
Great.

Benjamin Somers (31:45.207)
Yeah. Yeah. And Alan's stuff is really fun and it's really popular at recess. I think that's actually like the whole basis of it is that computers are good simulation machines. I'm obsessed with this guy named Seymour Papert. If you guys have ever heard of that guy, he studied under Jean Piaget, the guy who did the stages of development and then later became

Seth Fleischauer (32:05.812)
Yeah, Jean Piaget, who shares my birthday of August 9th. But anyway, go on.

Allyson (32:05.887)
Yes!

Benjamin Somers (32:09.463)
Ooh, fun.

Allyson (32:10.691)
Fun fact! I love Piaget!

Benjamin Somers (32:14.209)
But I, we, so Papert, this is getting nerdy, but, so Papert started under him and then later became, worked on some of earliest neural nets and computers with like Marvin Minsky and a bunch of the MIT people. And then later got into education where he, you he was obsessed with like, how do kids become, how do humans become smart? And then he was like, how do computers become smart? And then afterwards he was like, now that I've done both of these,

Allyson (32:19.404)
Now!

Benjamin Somers (32:40.333)
How can I think about them together and what have I learned about each that's relevant and interesting? And he's got a bunch of good quotes.

One of them is that everyone is interested in using computers to program children. So I want this kid to know this knowledge. I'm going to design the computer to impart it to the kid as fast as possible. And the other is, and his approach was the complete opposite, which is I'm interested in teaching children how to program computers. So do the opposite. Teach them to like use this thing as a tool. And a little bit in, he,

has this one analogy talking about French. So he said, if you go to any French class in America, you go to a hundred different French classes, a hundred different teachers, and you hang out there, you know, for the whole year. At the end of your study, you would conclude that kids can't learn French.

because you could go to a hundred different classrooms, a hundred different teachers, and none of the kids would really speak any French. They might know like 40 words. Now you take that same kid and you drop them in France and they'd be fluent within six months. And so clearly your takeaway was totally wrong that kids can't learn French. What you were wrong about is the environment was wrong. And so he then said, he's a math guy, and he made this connection and said, we've never seen a human that's fluent in math.

We are not aware of what math fluency looks like the way that we're aware of what French fluency looks like. And his departure from PHA was PHA said, these are the stages of child development and they happen at this age and this age and this stage and you get sensory motor and then you get object permanence and you do this. And said, those are actually wrong. That is not how human brains work. That is a consequence of the environment that the human brain is in. That those are the most valuable things for the brain to learn at any given time when you are a baby.

Benjamin Somers (34:39.713)
And if you could put the brain or the child or the human in a different environment, they would learn different things. And he looked at computers as being this very exciting new frontier where you could design alternative environments that were not constrained by physics, that are not constrained by reality, that by nature of growing up in them or experiencing them, would learn math the same way you learn French, just by existing and being.

Kids have this inherent ability to them. Anyway, so I agree with Alan's claim, and I think it's really special, and we can do some pretty magical things with the computer as a simulation machine to put kids in cool environments.

Seth Fleischauer (35:23.486)
Allison, you wanna?

Allyson (35:23.695)
I'm so excited. Yes, I will ask about the golden moment, but I am just you're just speaking to my soul. I'm so excited. I had so many thoughts right then about all of the things you're saying from PHA to an old professor of mine, Slavko, who literally we talked about this all semester. And we can talk more about that later, but just totally love the idea of thinking about thinking in both manners.

Seth Fleischauer (35:27.328)
Thank you.

Benjamin Somers (35:46.126)
Yeah.

Allyson (35:49.825)
the deviation away from PHA. It also makes me think of the first typewriter. The very first typewriter was A to Z. And they realized that it was too, you you were moving too fast, so all the ribbon would get messy. So they put all of the keys that we would use most on the left side, because you dominantly were, most humans are right-handed, so you automatically go slow. So I'm just thinking, my gosh, because that was constructing for the machine. And now I'm just thinking about digital culture.

Benjamin Somers (35:57.687)
Yeah.

Allyson (36:17.751)
Sorry, I'm tangenting because I'm just so excited. But I love everything that you have shared and learning from you. And I can't wait to learn even more from Recess. But you've obviously had such a breadth, such a depth of experience and education in this getting to Recess from before, having Recess, having it now grow on August 15th for all of the fun stuff that's coming up. So I wonder, is there one moment that sticks out for you?

Benjamin Somers (36:19.289)
That's good.

Allyson (36:42.465)
some shift in a student, a spark of curiosity, a team that formed that captured the magic of what you're the kind of learning that you're offering the world.

Benjamin Somers (36:59.405)
Yeah, I'm thinking about the most kind of like the my favorite example of them.

Benjamin Somers (37:10.029)
Maybe these two girls, Maddie and Ella, who...

They were both kind of just like hanging out on the platform and like doing the social thing. Cause it all started socially, right? There was no, you just came and spent time together. There was like no rules. And at some point they, I pitched them or someone pitched them on a podcast. And I think we kind of, we like not forced them to the first one, but like, should do it. And I think they're on episode 20 now and they presented at the Oxford kids conference and did really well. And they like, and the other day, both of them were talking about how they didn't.

Seth Fleischauer (37:38.368)
Mm-hmm.

Allyson (37:41.047)
Yay!

Benjamin Somers (37:47.617)
It's like giving a lot of clarity to why they want to do all sorts of things. Like they're learning about graphic design and do thumbnails and they're like spending time writing and to do better editing so they can go through the podcast and find the better parts and cut out the ones that are irrelevant and come up with good intros and,

Benjamin Somers (38:07.257)
There's a lot of them, that has probably been, you know, two kids who were kind of just like hanging out, having a good time and now have this very big project that's part of their life that they probably spend 10 or 15 hours a week on and have been for a long time. I tend to get excited by extended interest in one thing and continued dedication to it. And so that's been, there's a bunch of tiny examples of kid gets excited about something, recruits other kids.

Seth Fleischauer (38:18.036)
Hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (38:25.661)
Hmm.

Benjamin Somers (38:34.475)
I don't know, it's so specific to the kid, because sometimes it's like a kid who was shy for three months, you know, made a couple games and kids liked them and he got some confidence and now he speaks up in groups. And for that kid, that's like such the thing. And for some other kid, it's that they figured out how to do discipline and it's, I don't know, maybe hard to answer.

Seth Fleischauer (38:45.695)
Hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (38:53.254)
That's great. I feel like, I feel like we're just three kids who got really excited about a podcast. now here we are on episode 65. and speaking of that, we ask every guest, it's the name of the podcast. Why distance learning? What makes it not just an alternative, but a space for innovation and transformation.

Allyson (38:55.085)
Yay!

Allyson (39:01.021)
Yes, three kids that are just trying to tell the world how amazing distance learning is.

Benjamin Somers (39:02.881)
Let's go!

Benjamin Somers (39:06.701)
Yeah.

Benjamin Somers (39:20.318)
A bunch of answers. The first one is that you can work with people from anywhere. So the people we have teaching kids how to make their own videos have 250,000 subscribers on YouTube. And the people we have teaching kids math are winning International Math Olympics competitions. And so there's a lot of this stuff that would just never be possible at your local school. It has to be convenient for them. They have to able to log on for a couple hours.

who are the really best mentors, got a lot going on in their lives. And so I think this makes that possible. Two is that earlier of like, you find your people, you know? Like I think this podcast, if we had to do it in person, it'd probably be really unlikely to happen. And it's pretty fun that I think the four of us met and we'll probably all stay in touch and we're all obsessed about this space and topic. And that'll be a fun thing that gets to occur over the next couple of years.

And that's the same for kids. You they've got, you get to find your people in a way that you can't locally. And then I think there's a third one, which is kind of like weird, which is the coolest new stuff is always going to happen on the fringes and outside the system. And it's always going to have a relatively small group of people who are interested in it at the beginning. And those people are unlikely to be in the same place. And, and.

And I think if if you saw the, if you're trying to work in in-person learning experiences, you tend to have to really own the whole school day. And so you can't focus on just getting great at one thing first and doing that thing better than anyone else in the world. You kind of have to do like many things at least decently well. And I think what that means is you end up doing nothing that well. and so yeah, something about it is like a vehicle for making new stuff. You can start small. You can start with something specific for us. was like engineering based games, simulations.

Benjamin Somers (41:19.629)
and you can be the best in the world at that and recruit great people for it. And don't know, not my most buttoned up answer, but there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it.

Seth Fleischauer (41:27.808)
you

Seth Fleischauer (41:31.432)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Recess.gg. That's the website, right?

Benjamin Somers (41:36.471)
Yeah. Resus.gg.

Seth Fleischauer (41:37.342)
So we'll send people there. It'll be in the show notes. again, great name. for our listeners, if you've ever wondered what it looks like when student engagement is driven by choice, competition, and community, Ben Summers and the recess team are building that future right now. Please do check our show notes for access to recess. We'll have Ben's, X up there. It's still hard for me to get that out.

Allyson (41:41.539)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (42:02.604)
and, and anything else that he mentioned here, in terms of some of his inspirations, a big thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar. And, if this episode sparked a new way of thinking, please do share it with a colleague. Follow the show, leave it a review. This helps more educators discover these conversations and imagine what's possible in distance learning one bold idea at a time. Why distance learning? Because it's thrilling, student driven and here to stay.

Benjamin Somers (42:02.926)
Me too.

Allyson (42:12.717)
Thank you. Yay.

Benjamin Somers (42:13.325)
Woohoo!

Seth Fleischauer (42:32.34)
See you next time.