We were lucky to catch up with Cameron Radke recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Cameron thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

A great teacher can make any subject interesting; passion and preparation go a long way to cultivating curious and engaged students. However, the education system isn’t set up to appropriately reward the hard work teachers do, so unfortunately this dissuades the best and brightest future teachers to look elsewhere for a sustainable career, leaving the responsibility to overworked and underpaid teachers. For students, accelerated online learning tools are available (many of them for free) which begs the question: what is the best use of the 30-40hrs per week that children spend at school? With virtually any piece of information instantly available at our fingertips via Wikipedia, ChatGPT, and YouTube, spending classroom time simply disseminating information is a massive failure of opportunity. The real question to ask is how can classrooms foster creative thinking to solve interesting problems, productive collaboration with others, and self-motivated curiosity.

Cameron, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

For over a decade I have helped private students from ages 4-84 find a place for music in their lives. Now I’m taking my method and putting it into a more widely accessible format as a mobile game. Melody Quest provides an easily accessible way for children to engage with the fundamentals of music that apply to ALL instruments: rhythmic awareness, ear training, and two-hand coordination skills. Gameplay consists of completing rhythm and melody challenges to level up your character and gain special abilities to reunite the Kingdom of Badaboom. It feels like a game, not a series of lessons. While most games feature fighting as their core mechanic using swords or guns, Melody Quest offers something brand new. After a successful Kickstarter, we are building out the single player story mode and getting our demo into the hands of playtesters.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

My passion for music, genuine desire to inspire young learners, and patience. Showing up day after day for my students and being more than a teacher: for some I’m a role model, for others I’m a therapist. Being an active part of the musical community through my band shows how music can play a deeper role in life through connection, collaboration, and joy.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

This is an early story of resilience in regards to projects and ideas. Within the first week of coming up with the idea for Melody Quest, I had found the right video game developer to make it. After months of coding and working out a basic prototype with the dev team, I could finally play the game as a new player would. The problem: it wasn’t fun. It was a 3D lesson in “game” form. With the feeling of the experience in mind, day after day I would brainstorm and iterate ideas until I had a new plan. We built tons of new features that were more engaging, but I realized my vision was too grand; I needed to focus the project around the one thing that everyone found fun and easy to understand, and build from there. With this clearer picture of what’s fun and what’s possible in this medium, we refined the user experience for the core gameplay loop. I could have called it quits and saved my money after that first prototype, but my passion for the idea was so strong and so perfect for me to be the one to create that I leaned into the hard work. The resilience comes from being flexible with my approach by not being married to initial ideas. Admitting to myself (and my team) that I was wrong allowed for new ideas and collaboration to thrive and have a chance at success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://KingJam.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/camerones_
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/camradke/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-radke
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@camradke
• Other: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/camradke/melody-quest