Hello, listeners.
This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next?
Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives.
Every week I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.
They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately.
And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next.
Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well.
And, of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work school, everything.
You'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try.
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Hi, I'm Lindsay.
And I'm Marshall.
Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore stories of science discovery.
Today, we're doing science in a video game.
Wait, how do you do science in a video game?
In what video game?
We're doing a Minecraft experiment.
We're going to find out how a scientist turned one of the world's most popular video games into a laboratory to discover how we learn.
Today's question comes to us from a group of kids we'll be hearing from throughout this episode.
Hi, I'm Emlyn and I am 10 years old.
Hi, I'm Ollie, and I am 10 years old.
Hello, I'm Mia, and I'm 11.
I'm Charlie, and I'm 10.
I'm Ada, and I'm 10 years old.
That's a good number of kids, all asking the same question?
Yep.
How do people learn?
How do people learn?
How do people learn?
That's a pretty good question.
So what did they think the answer was?
School.
Education.
Practice.
Yeah, I think those are all good ways to learn.
I agree.
And they actually had more great ideas of how scientists could find the answer.
Maybe trying to teach them something to see how they can learn.
Putting things, suction cup thingies on your head that can read what you're thinking.
Ooh, suction cup thingies.
Here, wait, I've got one right now.
That's the idea.
So now it's time to ask our listeners, how do you think people learn?
And how would scientists find out?
Think about it because we'll be heading into a video game world of learning.
All right.
So we've gotten a lot of requests over the years from our listeners to do an episode about video games.
So when I heard about a scientist named Charlie Wu who used Minecraft to study how people learn, I knew I had to talk to him.
And Charlie told me how he ended up being a professional Minecraft scientist.
I think when I was a kid, I was interested in things kids are interested in, right?
I was interested in playing outside, in playing video games.
Yeah, that sounds like a normal kid.
Totally.
And he never lost his interest in doing kid things.
I think somehow that ended up translating really well into the science.
I do because today I get paid to essentially make video games and have people play them.
So I think in some ways I kind of have a bit of a dream job from a kid's perspective.
Wait, he thinks he has a bit of a dream job?
Just a bit of a dream.
Come on.
Sounds like a whole dream job.
That is an entire dream job.
I agree.
But before we go any further, I have to admit something.
What do you have to admit?
You and I, and I'm admitting this for you too, we're not Minecraft experts.
That is correct.
Yeah, I did just watch the Minecraft movie for this episode and I'm pretty sure I missed like 70 of the jokes.
Only 70?
It could be more.
So I asked the kids who asked today's question to be our Minecraft experts.
Okay, so the kids who asked us how do people learn aren't just curious kids.
They're our Minecraft brain trust.
Exactly.
So I asked them, why do they like Minecraft?
Like, what's made it so popular for so long?
And here's what they told me.
Because there's a lot of fun mobs that you can do and just kind of messing around in creative mode is fun.
Because like it's just like a free roaming game there's not really one thing you have to do.
Um, I like to play with friends most of the time, especially with friends and survival.
But when I'm by myself, I'm either making a house in creative or just trying to survive.
I think it really lets your mind wander and be creative like you can build anything you want there are no limits unless you're an Not uncreative.
Everybody technical.
Okay, so I've seen people play Minecraft, specifically 10-year-old people.
And I know it's extremely popular and it involves pigmen somehow.
That was in the movie.
I'm glad you know.
That's what that meant.
I'm sure there's like five listeners who are screaming at us right now that are like pigmen, pigmen pigment.
Or is it pigment?
Pigmen.
Pig men.
Okay.
Well, anyway, why would a scientist want to use Minecraft to study how people learn?
I'm really not sure I'm getting the connection there.
That's a really good question.
And to answer it, let's go back to Charlie and the things he used to do as a kid.
I actually think that like, my interest in Minecraft really comes from the fact that I was obsessed with Lego as a kid.
And I think Minecraft is just this kind of next evolution of Lego in some ways.
That does make sense.
I mean, I feel like I've seen a lot of overlap in people who are interested in Lego and people who are interested in Minecraft.
So another thing that Charlie was interested in when he was a kid was the question of what makes humans special.
And this question led him to become what's known as a cognitive scientist.
I study things like the brain.
I study how children are curious.
I study how people solve problems.
Cognitive scientists study how the mind works and how it processes information.
Charlie's especially interested in how humans learn and how that makes us special.
But he does it differently from other scientists.
Well, I think people who have studied human behavior in like psychology or neuroscience often use these experiments that are so incredibly boring.
All right.
I don't know.
Boring.
That's pretty harsh words there.
I know.
What does he think makes those experiments so boring?
Well, psychologists or neuroscientists who study the brain usually have people do very simple tasks like looking at images of different faces while you're hooked up to a tool that can measure your brain activity.
Sometimes the people we're studying, they get bored.
They zone out.
So I guess they're not really paying attention to what they're supposed to be responding to, because what they're responding to is boring.
Right.
And that's bad, because when people are bored it's harder to get good information or data about how they act when they're actually engaged or actively thinking about something.
So using things like video games allows us to kind of get richer data, because people are actually engaged more.
In other words, Charlie believes that video games are a good way to get a better picture of how people's brains work when they're learning.
I mean that makes sense, because video games are very engaging, sometimes more than they should be really.
Yeah, that can be a problem when you don't want to stop playing.
Yeah, like the 97 hours I've spent in City Skylines yesterday.
That's what I'm saying.
But back to Charlie.
So he decided to use video games to study how people learn.
But instead of building his own new game, he saw that Minecraft could let you build whatever you wanted, including a scientific experiment.
What?
That's crazy.
You can build an experiment in Minecraft?
Like, what blocks do you use for that?
I do know what kinds of blocks you use.
You do use blocks?
Yeah.
Are the pigmen involved?
Please tell me.
Okay, before I tell you the details, I wanted to ask our Minecraft experts what they thought Charlie's Minecraft experiment was.
Like they just took a bunch of people who didn't know anything about Minecraft and said okay, maybe just do this.
And I just saw them, like, work together or work completely by themselves if they're antisocial.
Huh.
So maybe setting up a situation where people had to learn about Minecraft together or alone, and that's a way to study how humans learn.
Maybe she's on to something.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Think about it while we take a quick break, because when we come back we'll find out what took Charlie seven years to design.
We're back.
When we left off, Charlie had decided to build an experiment in Minecraft to study how people learn.
And his first step was to ask a question.
So this experiment was really looking at when do people learn individually and when they look to others?
Yeah, so actually our Minecraft expert was kind of right, right?
Well, I think they hit on the idea behind Charlie's experiment.
Charlie wanted to know when do we decide to learn something on our own and when do we decide to learn from other people?
Got it.
So how did he test that in Minecraft?
Charlie created a mini game within the game played in fields of blocky fruit.
What we did is we created an experiment where one or four players are on a large field in Minecraft.
And in the field, there's a lot of these pumpkins or these watermelons.
The player's job was to smash pumpkins or watermelons.
Charlie sent me a video from a playthrough of the experiment and Marshall, I want you to watch it and describe it for us.
All right.
So I see what looks like a really gigantic field of green blocks, and blocky characters are running around and like waving their hands repeatedly in front of each block until it explodes.
That's the smashing, Marshall.
Oh, that's smashing.
So every now and again, there's like some blue smoke.
So these little like blue curly cues are like going up in the air.
It looks like there's actually four players roaming around in this truly gigantic field of blocks.
Oh, they got one.
Here it goes.
Oh, they got another one.
I could imagine spending eight hours just standing here smashing blocks.
You only get two minutes, though.
You only get two minutes?
Well, I'd do it again then.
Okay, so what was I watching besides people smashing things?
Okay, so here's what was really going on.
The players, or these were participants in Charlie's experiment.
They were trying to smash the blocks that would release those blue splashes or curly cues.
Those were the rewards they were trying to find.
And in each round, these rewards would either be hidden at random or grouped into clusters.
So if you find one reward from one pumpkin, then maybe other pumpkins nearby are more likely to also have a reward.
Okay.
So if you can find the cluster of rewards, you'll get a higher score, which is what everyone wants in a video game.
Exactly.
But here's the thing.
In some rounds, you'll play on your own and find rewards on your own.
But in the rounds with the other players, like the video that you just saw, you could see where others were finding their rewards.
So when someone else finds a reward, you can go over and kind of copy them a little bit.
Okay, so that's what I saw in the video, because the players did seem to be following another player while they were smashing their watermelons.
Yes, they were finding lots of rewards close to each other.
But remember, the rewards could also be placed randomly, too.
So in each two-minute long round, players had to decide on their strategy quick.
You have to decide quickly, do you look at other people or do you focus on searching yourself?
Okay, so the decision is to smash alone or smash with others.
Exactly.
And this is the moment in the experiment that Charlie was waiting for.
It was the moment that showed when people decide to learn from others and when they decide to learn on their own.
What we found is that in the situation where the rewards were clustered and social information was useful, they were looking a lot more at one another, versus where the rewards are random and there's no use for social information.
So when the players looked to others in the game and then followed what they did, Charlie called that social learning.
Wait, can you explain that more?
Because I know social has something to do with other people, like social studies or my favorite kind of social, the ice cream social.
But those are very different things.
Yeah, it's a little confusing.
So I wrote a jingle about social learning that might strike a chord with our Minecraft loving listeners.
It's to the tune of Steve's Lava Chicken.
Oh, no.
Do you know it?
No.
I see where this is going.
All right.
Well, there are the lyrics, and I want you to have a go at it.
Is that good?
It was so good.
Did I give it the full Jack Black style commitment?
I loved it.
And do you get what social learning is now?
Sure.
Why not?
It's going to be stuck in your head, just like Steve's love of chicken has been in mine.
Fair enough.
Okay.
So in real life, you're using social learning when you decide to follow someone doing something that looks fun.
And social learning pays off in the longer term, too.
There's a lot of things that maybe your parents will tell you when you're a kid.
That Seems like dumb.
Why would I do that, right?
But only in the long run do you realize it actually makes sense, right?
Why would I brush my teeth every day?
I guess we don't want to learn that our teeth can fall out on our own.
We're willing to take our parents' word for it.
Exactly.
So back to our Minecraft fields.
Charlie found that the players who could quickly decide whether or not to use social learning got the most rewards.
The better that people could adapt and switch between individual learning and social learning.
That was the best predictor of which of the participants did the best in the experiment.
So the experiment had nothing to do with pre-existing Minecraft skills, but everything to do with how quickly you figure out whether it's worth it to follow the crowd or do your own thing.
Exactly.
So the final step in Charlie's study was to analyze all the data that he got from the game.
Kind of like the ultimate scientific replay.
And using that data, he built a computer player that made decisions about which blocks to smash.
Just like a human.
In science, what we really want to do is we want to predict behavior.
Once we can predict behavior well, we've understood something about it.
Okay, so by building the model, Charlie learned how to predict players' behavior.
Yes, and that taught him something important about social learning.
We don't only kind of do a specific type of social learning, but we know when to use it and when to not use it, depending on when the situation calls for it.
So could we say that the big takeaway is that humans are flexible learners?
Yeah, we could.
And Charlie also told me that while this Minecraft study was with adults, he's done other types of studies with kids.
And he's found that kids look to others for information much more often than adults.
So his advice is that while you're a kid, you should have lots of different learning experiences, doing lots of different and interesting things.
You shouldn't just do one thing.
So you shouldn't make your whole life about playing video games.
You should also do other things, right?
Go outside and play outside and do sports and run and ride your bike and go swimming, read books, ask questions, go to the library.
So I think having kind of a more balanced life of fun and leisure will maybe make you more prepared for the future.
That's really great advice.
So basically, Charlie built a mod in Minecraft that explains how we learn.
Basically.
So I wanted to ask our Minecraft experts what they learned from this episode.
I learned that human brains adapt to social situations without using them, would just assume that minecraft is just a fun game, but you can actually use it to discover more and do science experiments like the one that we just learned about.
Yeah, who knew that in minecraft you could build a new understanding of the human brain?
Definitely one of the coolest mods i've ever heard of.
And right, that's how you use mods.
Yeah, i think.
Yeah yeah, this is the understand the brain mod.
Now that you've learned how Charlie used Minecraft to study learning, think about how you would design a game to study human behavior.
Follow the scientific process.
First, ask a simple question about how people play games.
Then, think about how you would design a game to test it.
It could be an existing game or a game that you come up with yourself.
Think about how you would collect data in the game.
Would you record it, ask people to take surveys, or something else?
Let us know your ideas.
Email them to us at tumblepodcast at gmail.com.
We'd love to hear your game experiments.
Thanks to Dr. Charlie Wu, professor at TU Jamstadt in Germany.
Thanks also to our Minecraft kid experts, Emlyn, Ollie, Ada, Mia, and Charlie, the kid.
You can learn more about Charlie the scientist, see the video of the experiment and find a transcript of this episode on the blog on our website, sciencepodcastforkidscom.
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If you want to listen to our show in Spanish, you should check out Tumble en Español, adapted and hosted by our good friends Nuria and Alvaro.
Find it at tumbleenespañol.com or search for Tumble en Español wherever you get your podcasts.
Elliot Hijage is back as our assistant producer.
Welcome back, Elliot.
Sarah Robertson-Lentz is our managing editor and created the episode art.
Mixing and Mastering is by Gary Calhoun James.
I'm Lindsay Patterson, the executive producer of the show, and I wrote this episode.
I'm Marshall Escamilla, and I make all the music for Tumble.
Tumble Science is a production of Tumble Media.
Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more stories of science discovery.
All right everybody, here we are at the end of the episode, as you can tell by the cool music that I have going on under me, that I composed for our hurricane episode.
Isn't it great?
Give it a listen.
Yeah.
Anyway, I wanted to give a big shout out to new patrons Veronica and Morgan.
Thanks, y'all, for joining and supporting us.
We really appreciate it.
And now on to some birthdays.
First, a happy birthday on December 13th to Graham.
Welcome to your 10th orbit around the sun.
Mom and dad love you and your gentle and curious soul so much.
Here's to many more orbits.
A happy December 13th birthday to Pierre.
Enjoy it with love from Kafa and Mama.
And Milo Sloth, I hope you got a great birthday on the 13th as well coming up.
Enjoy your time playing baseball.
Christopher, Mom, Dad, and Allison are so proud of you.
They love how you love listening to Tumble.
Thanks, man.
Singing along to the Capybara song, which I like that one too.
Learning about axolotls and dreaming about galaxies.
I hope you have a great birthday on December 14th.
To Max, Mommy, Mama, and Lane, love you so much.
Have a happy birthday on December 15th.
A happy December 16th birthday to Carolina.
Keep being the talented, kind, and brave person you are.
Your family is so proud of you.
A happy December 16th birthday to Desmond.
Always stay curious.
Your imagination will take you to millions of worlds in your mind and worlds beyond Earth.
A happy December 18th birthday to Ash.
Mom and Dad love your curiosity and interest in the world around you.
Have a great one.
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All right, all right, you guys, you're all still here.
You're the precious few who listen all the way to the end.
Last time i got a lot of emails about the bridge snot offer and big congratulations to wills from seattle, washington for picking up a free copy of bridge or bust from upper story, who are my favorite stem toy makers in the world for sure.
Go check them out.
They just do amazing stuff.
Unfortunately, the free one is claimed, but if you're still listening and you just want a special code for 15 off, go ahead and send me an email at tumblepodcast at gmailcom and tell me how much you love the social learning song.
I'll get you that code right away.
