We recently connected with David Lance and have shared our conversation below.

Hi David, thanks for joining 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

The industrial age (1760-1840) was a hugely important time in American history. Factories became important and increasing production was the main goal. Schooling became a state-run institution (Common Schools Movement) that moved kids from schoolhouses with all ages of students learning together to one of the successive levels with an age-appropriate curriculum. In 1905, we started measuring student intelligence through tests.

This was the last major pedagogical overhaul of how we teach students. Kids have been sitting in class, listening to lectures, and taking tests ever since.

In 1986, my first experience with computers in school was a Commodore 64. We played an awesome game called Logo where you move a turtle around to different coordinates and draw pictures. It was a transformative experience! Computer lab time was highly anticipated and so exciting. Video games at school. I mean, c’mon. How awesome is that?!? The impact of that week in the computer lab was so great that it’s one of only 2 memories I have of that year (watching the Challenger explosion live was the other).

Fast forward 12 years to 1998. I’m in college and I do my first Google search. It’s an insane experience to have so much information available so quickly. Proficient ‘googling’ becomes an important skill so much so that years later I used ‘expert googler’ during a job interview and got the position.

Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007 and all of a sudden, a computer and the entire internet were walking around with me. I didn’t even have to go find a computer anymore to find the information I needed.

Yet, despite these advancements, students still learn using traditional, industrial age style lectures. The school’s goal is to score high enough on a standardized test that the school gets the funding needed. Unfortunately, as science shows, lectures in preparation for tests do not produce meaningful, long-term knowledge increases. The kids know this. Simply Google to find an answer with almost no thought. Copy and paste a picture into a presentation. Cram notes taken during a traditional lecture for Friday’s test. Forget most of it by Monday.

My goal is to achieve large student knowledge retention improvements through meaningful, exciting, and intentionally engaging experiences. We need to utilize the massive capabilities of the computers in our pockets and the powerhouses on our desks to build these experiences. Blur the line of fun and education. Meet kids where they are.

Video games are this avenue. Imagine games so fun that kids want to play them just for entertainment. Swap out fictional characters for representations of real-world items and have them behave in the way they really would, but in a fun, gamified way. This accomplishes a few important things.

First, kids build emotional relationships with game objects. It’s much easier to remember what an object is, does, and how it relates to other objects if you’ve had experience with that object. You personalize the object. It’s a stark contrast to memorizing a fact from a workbook.

Second, in video games, kids are not hesitant to think outside the box. There is no real-world cost to failure in a video game. Test your theory. Fail. Try again. It’s all very quick and cumulative. It’s strategy building. Kids are accustomed to this type of cycle in all their popular games, and it’s a stark contrast from the damaging effects of not performing well on a test.

Third, there’s a potential for students who are enjoying themselves to work ahead. There are many great effects from this. They’re exposing themselves to material for the first time on their own. They’re trying to figure it out, which causes deep thought and comprehension. And, when they’re not completely sure, they bring informed questions back to the teacher. The focus in class then becomes a place to fill in the gaps and excel, not a place of first exposure and desperate note-taking on topics they’ll only comprehend later if they put in the proper homework time. Cramming notes leaves little time for true comprehension of the topic and no support for answered questions at the moment when questions come up.

To have a more fulfilling life and career, I encourage kids to find something they’re truly passionate about and deep dive into that topic. Get totally fascinated and geek out all over it. Have fun along the way.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’ve felt a calling to meaningful leadership for quite a long time. For me, that looks like deep discussions centered around “why” things are the way they are and learning from each other to discover new perspective. What led us here to this point? What was that person experiencing when they wrote that piece? How does that translate to me? And ultimately, how do we use that experience to move us all forward?

I’m also passionate about kids. I have 2 of my own… 17 & 13 years old. Watching them grow, meet challenges, and conquer their fears has been an absolute joy. I like to call myself a “professional sideliner” (one who has excitedly cheered from almost every baseball and soccer sideline in DFW). More nights than not, I’m supporting them and learning from them.

It’s those 2 pillars in my life that almost requires my latest endeavor. At Istet Games, we build video games that allow kids to discover the world around them through highly engaging, entertaining, and educational experiences. I want to cheer on kids who are curious and are willing to deep dive into a topic.

The title I’m working on now is called The Immune Game Project. It’s a curriculum and video game that simulates the immune system being invaded by an advanced HIV infection. Your goal is to defend the lymph nodes from the attacking pathogens for 5 minutes. We’re just in the prototype phase now but hope to evolve it into the first eSport for Biology. I hope you’ll go on our website and join our newsletter for updates. We’ve got some exciting things coming this year. (https://www.istet.co).

Our guiding principle is Guided Discovery Learning. Newborn to 2 years old the most educational time in anyone’s life and at Istet Games we’re modeling ourselves after that transformative time. Think about learning to walk. We learn through falling. Try something new, fall. Parents cheer. Try something else, fall. Parents cheer. It’s only through failure and positive reinforcement that we eventually succeed. We go away from this at traditional schools, unfortunately where failure quickly becomes feared.

Video games are the perfect way to get back to celebrating failure. Test a theory, fail. Try another theory, fail. Eventually, learn from your mistakes and succeed. Your understanding of the topic is now a part of you, and you have it at your disposal. Add in some guidance and encouragement from a teacher and we have a recipe for massively deep learning.

I hope you’ll join our movement as we build out the immune system simulator. We’re excited to provide a platform kids can learn from without fear.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The game I originally wanted to build (and will complete someday) is called Reservation Earth. Its goal is to teach computer programming by automating an army of bots to help you with your tasks. The economy in the game is realistic. You have missions, or you can do your own work, to mine minerals that can be sold on the open market. If you don’t find that task fun, purchase a robot and program it to do the task for you. That game was progressing nicely until one day when I met Robert Clegg.

Robert is a pioneer in the Game-Based Learning space. In 2004, he wrote a game to teach Algebra. It was played by millions of kids in dozens of school districts. He won multiple CoDIE and Macworld Editors awards for that game. When he saw what I was doing, he arranged a call, and it was obvious almost immediately that our heart for kids and education through video games aligned. He brought the original immune system simulator and we agreed that working together to improve it, especially during this pandemic, was worth pivoting projects.

One thing we completely agree on is that the news is scary for kids. It’s all gloom and doom about the pandemic. News outlets don’t consider that the audience might not be educated on how the immune system works, how vaccines work, or even what a pathogen is. We feel it would be helpful if kids knew and understood what the news was talking about. Hopefully, that would make things just a little less scary and they could ask better questions.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Any company’s most captive audience is their email list. These are the people who have expressed interest enough in what you’re doing to provide you with a direct communication path with them. This list is to be treasured and protected at all costs. They must be confident you will never sell their information as most will consider that a breach of trust. We use it to introduce ourselves with a few emails after a person joins our list. We want them to know where our hearts are and to build excitement for our movement. Once that’s done, I like to send out our most important communications through email being careful to be respectful of their inbox. I don’t like to send emails too often.

We’ve also created social media accounts, but I enjoy the conversations most on Facebook. We have a private group where our VIPs can go to discuss any variety of topics in game-based learning, our projects, what they’re struggling within education, fun articles, etc. It’s nice to have a community of like-hearted parents and teachers discussing and learning from each other.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.istet.co
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/immunegameproject