__When George Lucas decided to launch a multimedia education arm of Lucas-film Ltd., he faced many tough decisions. But selecting someone to preside over Lucas Learning Ltd. wasn't one of them. From the onset there was one woman for the job: Susan Schilling. "I started my search by looking at the products that captivated my own children and found that Schilling produced the majority of them," says Lucas, a self-styled education advocate.
Lucas named Schilling general manager of the division in March 1996. Her move ended a 10-year run at the pioneering educational software firm MECC, where she developed such award-winning titles as Oregon Trail II and Mathkeys, and where she germinated the "learn by discovery" philosophy that would become her guiding principle.
In her role at Lucas Learning, Schilling seeks to bridge the gap between pedagogy and play: she plans to target products that combine the commercial zing of gamemaker LucasArts Entertainment with the scholastic spirit of the research- and policy-oriented George Lucas Educational Foundation. The first release, a Star Wars-related product, is expected in early 1998.__
Wired: What's required of today's educational CD-ROM developers?
Schilling: You need to have people who understand the technology, because they have to translate all of the speeches and the highfalutin theory into something that's practical in that medium. People who think visually, people who think with light - instead of the text-based learning style now prevalent in schools. And you need people who understand kids and what kids are interested in. Over the centuries, most people have been oral and visual learners, rather than text learners. We may be at a point where we're going back to some of those strengths - with the computer we have the ability to make an interactive and active learning experience.
What about the flip side: people are saying that as a society we're getting away from reading and are becoming illiterate.
A balanced life means you can learn in a variety of ways. There are certain people who are predisposed to one way or another. One researcher who's looked into this extensively is Howard Gardner, who wrote Multiple Intelligences. Our educational system has picked up on a very analytical, logical, text- and numbers-based way of teaching, which isn't for everybody. The best educational software will include text, visual images, and active participation. A good program is going to give kids as much control as possible over the environment. You need to control the pedagogy.
Having had the catbird seat over the years, what do you think of the state of our public education system?
People who take time to dialog about the education system usually sound like they're damning it. I don't think there are any greater heroes than teachers. But the organization called school and the industry called education do seem to be in need of reform. If you take a person from 100 years ago and put them on a street corner, they'd be blown away. But if you take that person and put them in a classroom, within five minutes they would know exactly what's going on. It's the same blackboard; it's the same book-based learning; it's the same sit at your desk in a row and write down what I'm saying at the board. Any other industry has changed dramatically over 100 years. Education has to go through that transition.
Will technology be an important factor in driving the reform?
I'm not sure. There are certainly indications from the different pilot programs people have tried over the years that technology does have a positive impact on the way kids feel about learning, as well as the outcome. The pilots are good, the evaluations are excellent, but it always seems to stop there. I know that the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow have produced some incredible documentation around long-term effectiveness of technology use. You could say, 'Of course it's positive - it's funded by a technology company.' But I do believe the results are accurate.
Where do you see specific advantages to teaching in the electronic realm as opposed to teaching with a textbook?
It allows equal access to a high-quality presentation that enhances learning. That learning can be done in the schools, in the homes, in the centers that serve the more disadvantaged populations. One of the most moving experiences I've had was when we did some product testing six or seven years ago with a tool that MECC had developed under a grant from the state of California. It was a geography product, World Geograph, and we were testing it with various ethnic groups to see if there were differences in learning styles and how different populations dealt with these tools. This time we were testing with African-American youth. It was a visual interface, so whatever data you chose would appear on the map. One kid said, "Show me all the countries of the world that have majority populations of people with color," and the whole world lit up. It was an eye-opener for them - as people of color in a white-majority state like Minnesota, they grow up believing that they are not a people of the world. When they saw this picture they went crazy. All of a sudden they were talking about the gross national product of this country versus the state of California. They were learning about geography, they were learning about human history, they were learning about all sorts of things that they wouldn't have been if there wasn't some sort of a personal connection made. A good teacher might have been able to do that, but the fact that they had discovered it themselves made the learning very real and very personal to them.
Having come out of the education market, what's it like rechanneling your expertise to the commercial?
We can leave behind some of the things we'd have to pay attention to if we were targeting schools. Schools have a lot of committees and standards - in certain states, you have to go through many hoops. But now I get to focus on the consumer market, where parents and kids are excited about using technology and just want to get on with it. And that could be the impetus that forces a change - that makes communities and parents say, Wait a minute, this is the future, and my kids aren't getting it in the school. I'm giving it to them in the home, so what am I paying for?
How do you envision your unit at Lucas?
We're going to put together three or four teams that we hope will create the highest quality material of both content and presentation. George is providing creative direction for all the products, so he and I are meeting about some things he'd like to see happen, specifically, and some of the things he wouldn't like to see happen, specifically.
What would George like to see happen?
A marriage has to happen between solid education and the things kids like to do. It just makes me weep sometimes - there are some good educational experiences for kids, but because of what they see in entertainment, they're not going to choose them. Their parents are going to choose for them, and who knows how long the kids will play with the stuff. There's got to be a way to bring the two elements closer together and let kids experience the magic of learning something. That's not to say learning has to be fun all the time, because we all know that sometimes the stuff we value the most is the stuff we've struggled with.
Is it possible to find that happy medium - a product that is fulfilling educationally and also a commercial success?
Yes, but some of what's out there feels like the worst of both worlds.
Care to name any names?
No, but let's just say a product that gives the educational aspect the Missouri River treatment - an inch deep and a mile wide. It doesn't really provide the education, and the entertainment value is compromised as well because the designers think they're doing something solemn and serious. We need to look at what makes games fun and see how to apply it to meaningful content delivered in a purposeful way. It comes down to active learning, as opposed to interactive, which is what you have in the games environment. Active learning starts with giving children creativity tools. The opportunity to use a drawing program or a painting program to create allows them to develop a sense of empowerment over these tools early in life. That's part of why kids react to technology differently than we do. They know that they can get it to do what they want, whereas we adults are never quite sure that if we push a button it won't all go away.
LucasArts has had a lot of success in coming up with the right formula on the gaming side.
Look at what makes games intriguing: they offer challenge, fantasies; they stimulate curiosity; they're internally reinforcing, goal-oriented, complex, and quick. Those qualities can be applied to any genre. You start by finding a task that is educationally meaningful, that provokes thought in the kids. I think the whole idea of letting kids learn by discovery and exploration is terribly important. So, what we're looking at is an environment that's fun for kids, with characters they recognize and have some kind of positive thoughts about.
Will you be leveraging characters from the Lucasfilm library?
Conditions being what they are, I don't think you could enter the consumer market today without having a strong property behind you, and George has certainly got some of the strongest. Right now, we're looking at the Star Wars universe and choosing the things that make the most sense to deliver an educational message. Eventually, we'll be looking at the Indiana Jones material. It's so rich. It's just waiting for someone to do something with it, and Mr. Lucas would just as soon do it himself as let someone else do it.
Are there any excellent edutainment titles out there?
I think so. Obviously, there are the enduring ones, the ones they call "evergreen" products. They're evergreen for a reason. Some of them might have been the first in a category and have been updated as the technologies have grown. The new versions haven't violated anything critical to the original idea, so it kind of kept growing. You've got all the Sim products - SimAnt, SimCity. Then you have other evergreens like Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego? and Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail is a simulation, and Carmen San Diego is an adventure and problem-solving thing, which really is a new category.
What other categories are there ? What will you focus on?
You've got creativity tools; you've got simulations; you've got storybooks. Then there's drill and practice, which a lot of parents are comfortable with because it reminds them of how they learned. A Math Blaster or a Reader Rabbit is appealing to parents, and they're the ones who buy them for kids: "I know this, this is drills!" But parents have to understand why they're buying the software. Do they want it to babysit the kids? Or do they want to be at the computer with the kids, creating something? Then there are parents who are looking for academic subject matter to enhance something the child already has, and that's another category. We'll take an interdisciplinary approach, using combinations. I think it's fair to say we won't be doing anything that's pure drill.
Do you think CD-ROM is its own creative medium rather than an offshoot of games or movies?
I can see it both ways. It could just be a temporary technology while we all wait for things to happen interactively on the Internet. Alternatively, it does have some characteristics that make it a unique environment, because of the ability not only to present visual images and moving images, but also to interact with them. In the Hollywood realm there was a lot of porting stuff over, and in the educational realm there was a lot of just, Well, let's run this off to a CD and say we've got a CD product. As you get into designing for the CD you find that it has different capabilities and features. So we'll have to see how permanent that medium is.Will online classrooms ever be a reality? A good application of an Internet program can really bring the learning alive. One product, called Project North, is a good example of that. It tracks the arrival of spring on the North American continent. The kids track it from their homes. They do backyard research and start reporting to each other when the first leaf came out on a certain tree, when they saw the first monarch butterfly, and when the first robin appeared. Then the teachers start to build maps and follow the migration patterns - all based on kids' input. Then they have discussions in the classroom. Why do you suppose insects come before the birds? And why do you suppose this particular species takes this route rather than going farther west?
Again, a good teacher who knows how to use the tool can really make it something that the kids own. And if you own your learning, it becomes a lot more important to you than if it's something that somebody makes you do.
There are many ways the technology can help the educational aspect, the content and the instruction. But part of what we're teaching our kids is to be in a relationship with others. Technology can't help with all of those social and physical skills you're developing in the classroom.
How would you define the purpose of schooling today?
A lot of the charter schools see their purpose as training kids to be worldwide citizens. When my son graduates from high school in 2000, his competition for a job is not going to be here in California, it's going to be worldwide, with the kid from Japan, the kid from Switzerland. The forward-looking people are getting a very different picture than those who look backward to the industrial model and at what kids needed to be productive citizens then. I could wax eloquent, and I know George could also, about saving the democracy (laughs). But it kind of comes down to that in a lot of ways. If we're not educating kids to value democracy, to value freedom, and to be able to work in a global way to solve global problems - because we're all connected - then there's not much hope for the republic.
