Cofounder, Expertrons
Game- Over Theory ; Learn better with games | Jatin Solanki | TEDxNMIMSBangalore
"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"; The new theorists in education believe "A lot of work and a lot of play while you're at it, makes jack and everyone else a winner". Games have been a ritualistic and patterned element of community and society since man was born and evolved, as men evolved , so did the games. Games have proven efficacy in enhancing and driving accelerated learning for players, why not use these games and their secret ingredients in shaping young minds ?
Jatin has been a part of multiple early start-up companies, working hand in hand with their product
development t...
About Jatin Solanki
In a March 2019 TEDx talk, Jatin Solanki, cofounder of Expertrons, discussed the "Game Over Theory," which he described as the idea that a game is not over unless the user accepts defeat and does not use the hidden retry option. He argued that failure is a necessary part of learning and that gamification can help people persist through setbacks. Solanki recounted receiving a low score on a math test in seventh grade and hiding the result, a response he later said he regretted, as he believes failure should be treated as part of the learning process. Solanki stated that games break larger goals into smaller steps with instant gratification, and he applied this concept to learning by breaking chapters into smaller missions. He suggested that any larger goal, such as losing weight, could be turned into daily levels with points, leaderboards, and rewards. He noted that children who lose at games like Candy Crush often feel more motivated to try again, and he advocated for applying that same principle to education and other areas of life.
Transcript (8 segments)
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Jatin Solanki0:11
Schools across India and right when it stopped when I was in my, I mean when I joined my college and I was at one place for four years at IIT Bombay. So yeah, when I was in my seventh grade, this is back in 2002, and I had a surprise class test. It was a maths class test and I got a three out of ten in that surprise class test. I used to hide that paper from my friends, family, each society. A lot of these people, can you guess why did a seventh grade child do a permutation and combination of these things which my parent, teacher, or friends, or society would do? And that I did in my seventh grade. I used to hide that paper. Now when I look back, I should not have done that. I mean, failure is part and parcel of any learning process. So anything we learn, anything we do new, failure is part of that learning process. So I like to ask you, how did we learn cycling? Yeah, failure was part of that process as well. Yeah, so we did fall multiple times. And similarly, I mean, it also holds true for my first cooking.
So you see a lot of adults play games, a lot of kids play games. They play games, they lose at some or the other level. So you can see a child losing a Candy Crush game at level 15, and you can see an adult losing a Candy Crush game at say level 10. But you don't see them feeling bad about losing a game. You never see a child going to a parent and crying that 'Dad, I failed in level 15 of Angry Birds' or 'Mom, I failed in level 10 of Candy Crush or Subway Surfer.' And that's when we started analyzing what is it about games that makes it so compelling. On the contrary, you never see them going and crying.
Weekend when he has my phone and when he loses, he or she loses a game, and then there is a character laughing before them and they are like, 'Okay, now I'm going to teach this character a lesson.' And he plays the entire day, he plays the entire night, he wins that game, and he comes back to me and he says, 'Can you do it?' So that's the attitude a child has towards games. And that's when we started thinking, what is it about games which makes it so compelling? Okay, so games usually have a larger mission, like saving a princess or like you have stolen a shrine from a temple and you are basically running away from a monster.
Smaller levels and there are missions and then there are power-ups, there is a lot of gratification in it. And that's when I discovered the Game Over Theory. Okay, so now I'm going to tell you something about the Game Over Theory. The Game Over Theory is basically the game is not over unless the user accepts defeat and doesn't opt for the hidden retry option in the game, which is always present. So there is a hidden retry button which is always present in all of our game over cases. And I mean, the game is actually not over unless you accept the defeat. So these are a few game screens and you can see there's a retry button in the bottom. Unless the child chooses that I'm...
We thought, I mean, because 35% of our life we kind of are drowned into learning, and we do, I mean, this is a major experience of our life. And we thought, why not gamify the entire experience of learning and maybe act the same compassion, the same view towards what he has towards games in learning? And that's when we kind of gamified learning. So earlier my cousin had to learn books of physics, and we thought why not gamify the entire process? So we broke the same Force and Pressure chapter into smaller islands, smaller missions which he could accomplish. So me and my team for the last six years now...
Chance to replay, you give them a chance to... So you can see the third screen, there's a hidden replay button. So you want the section more, right? Yeah, every day 40 us we cannot have, but maybe 40 minutes or maybe half an hour. Okay, so this was what happened in a classroom.
Could kind of add a lot of value, and the same Game Over Theory can be applied at different phases of our life. So if there is a bigger goal you have, you can kind of break it into smaller missions, smaller levels. And it can be any goal. It can be saving the princess, or it can be actually losing eight kgs in eight weeks. And you would want to do it by gamifying it. You would want to have say 10 points for running seven kilometers every day. You would want to have 60 levels for the next 60 days, and you would want to clear each level every day. You would want to do it with your friends, you would want to have a leaderboard, you would want to actually see are they doing it, what are they scoring, where are they faring. And that's how you would want to kind of have points, real rewards.
People had a retry button, I would have tried it again, I would have scored better, I would have got say five out of ten, and I would have tried it again, and I would have this time got eight out of ten, and I would have done it over and over again to kind of perform better than how I performed the last time. So in life, there are so many game over situations you come across every time. So you can remember the Game Over Theory and look for the hidden retry button in all those situations. Thank you.