Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of the Home Shoppers show today. I am standing inside a 2014 BMW M6 that was provided to us by none other than one of the best dealerships in town Prestige Marks. Now this BMW is gonna be a highlight of the series, but another highlight is gonna be the most expensive apartment we have ever showcased in private property Home Shoppers show history and that is a 17 million rand two-story penthouse suite on the 10th floor number 10 0 1 Sunset towers so get ready get your popcorn and get seated because we're gonna go on a ride and Here I am within a 2014 BMW M6 grand coupé now this coupé in particular is fitted with an aftermarket from the dealer Acropovic exhaust so when you mash your foot down you get a lot of extra growl The sports car absolutely launches, but yet it is still a full-size sedan But let's go through the numbers zero to a hundred four point two seconds 560 horsepower 500 pound feet of torque it also has an absolute Menagerie of extra features now those features include lane keeping assist heated and cooled seats reverse camera Bang and Olufsen sound system that raises up from the dashboard There's no way you don't sit in this car and feel like you've made it in life it being a sports car It is still so comfortable so relaxing to drive so easy to drive such a nice groupie steering wheel very really Have a fun steering wheels this comfortable I know it's probably an odd thing to say but being yeah take this car for a test drive and you'll feel it for yourself You have different buttons for you to customize your different driving modes Maybe you want a sporty steering wheel, but comfort suspension Maybe you want sporty suspension, but a comfort steering and you know sportsy engine response You can do all of that in this car The whole interior is trimmed with carbon fiber with Alcantara headliner as well as leather Above your head as well and that makes this car feel like you're driving in the back of the wheel I love it and I'm sure you will too So if you're in the market for a sports car If you're in the market for a full-sized family sedan to fit for but you want one with some extra power with some extra What I want you to do is contact Dominique from Prestige Marks and schedule a test drive today I promise you you won't regret it and if you don't get this car guys I can't promise that I might not miss a couple of meals and buy one for myself But we are just outside at the building. We're about to film 17 million three bedroom three and a half bathroom penthouse So we're gonna go there and show you what high-class living really feels like stick with the home shopper show right here at private property


Good afternoon to you all. Unfortunately, my Catalan, it's Bonatarda, Sabahanor. My German, sorry, my Arabic is a little bit better. I would like to apologize because this morning has been quite stressful for me. I couldn't be here because the reason being, well, our flight has been canceled at the very last minute. So thank you very much for your understanding and patience to you all, the audience and the organizers. And a special thanks to Mr. Uriel López and Lourdes Pradas for their kind invitation. It's always a pleasure to come back here to Barcelona. My speech today, as usual, we start with a sort of letter to Santa. Some of the objectives are reached. Some others are never. My idea, at least, is to give you a broader spectrum so that I can welcome research fellows here to carry on with a few research lines. But it's hard sometimes to offer specific figures and conclusions. First of all, I would like to express a few of the reasons why some of these Arabs from the Mašrík and the Maghreb actually wanted to join the brigades. And the idea we have is that Totem Revolutum, quite homogenous, was where some ideas have been forgotten about. I would like to analyze the Maghreb or Moroccan actually participation in some military actions, some operations, some battalions, et cetera. Specifically, all about their ideology. And it's quite paradoxal when it comes to this collective imaginary of those moros, of those moors, those Moroccan forces by Franco, which used any sort of violence, burning and annihilating. But hey, let's remember the way Moroccan is in the international brigade. It's a paradox, indeed. But there were a series of motivations and reasons that actually had these Moroccan people working on one side or the other. And I would like to talk about Arab and specifically Moroccan soldiers, because not only we've spoken about the international perspective of this conflict, it's the idea that you were not only coming to work only for liberties in Spain, but against fascism in Spain, but also to defend liberties all over the globe. I would like to change also our idea about the Arab world. And I would like to highlight and question the negative idea that is portrayed on the Moorish person. This is my letter to Santa. When it comes to literature, we don't have actually a lot. So I would like to welcome research fellows to Lordes Lidia, the Sivring project. It's wonderful what they're doing. I have been checking your sources for us, your reference source. A wonderful one for people studying this topic. And here I would love you to encourage to carry on and let's feed and help each other. Because we have a long path to walk. Now, some work that is on post-prod at the moment by Amal Ramses, you come from far away, the film by this Egyptian director. I don't want to spoil you the story. This is a great film, Anas, for bibliographical work, Abdelatif Ben Salim, a Tunisian colleague. He was one of the first researchers who was interested to talk about the Arab volunteers and Yara de Castells, the classic one. There's a great article by Porafoy, who is doing field work in the Soviet archives and which has offered us a great list to consult. Kafa, Mustafa, is one of the great unknown authors. But his work is very, very interesting. One of the Arabism, Pedro Martinez Montabe, who did highlight already the great left-wing commitment of Arabs towards the fight and the defense of democracy in Spain. Nieves Paradella, one of the best translators who's carried out the first trial to talk about Nafjati Siddik. And I will read a few fragments about his career, his work. And of course, the gator, Nafati Siddikli. It was presented in a man in Jordan. He presented his PhD, which is unknown in Spanish. Right, this is basically the relatively scarce bibliography which we have so far. This actually makes our participation very scarce, very little. These are some figures, and I would like to mention sources. But this let me highlight its work that still has to be re-analyzed. The origin of the Arab regators is the main problem in order to actually find out the exact figures. Because in the database, both terms are included, so it's quite easy to do specific searches. If we're looking for Palestinians, for example, we find Jewish or Arab origin Palestinians, or people from Algeria, again, could be from Spanish origin, et cetera. This is why I would like to highlight the easy to use database, because we face many difficulties at the beginning of our work. And from up to the year round, 1,000, again, take it with a pinch of salt, we estimate that around half of these 1,000 people could die on Spanish soil. Again, it's not 100% validated information. What happens? Well, this participation has been ignored in academia in the past. For example, masters done in 2007, 2013, we see that some stereotypes are spoken about in the, it's not spoken about the participation of North African volunteers. Also, a sort of closeness relationship with the origin countries was established. And this propaganda work was very important for the Arab world.  And again, a few that either doesn't exist or it's really hard to validate. Again, helps for these stereotypes to be chronic, you know, run and rain. For example, this great source, when it comes to analyzing the Jewish rigidist in Palestine, it's true that his information that he has managed to prove highlights again the fact that maybe we do have a few information. But in some of the cases, information is not analyzed in depth. For example, Al-Baghri is the country's, he just says Al-Jir and Morocco. So we are sort of a baby, you know, if you allow me the metaphor, we're beginning to do this analysis. One of the first authors who has publicly talked about this is Aldeep Rajit Mangilon, a specialist in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. And when he launched this idea in an academic arena, the surprise was incredible because basically nobody knew about it. And afterwards, Ben-Salem Cajaz's work, Sanchez Roano, where one of the few testimonies by a Moroccan propagator is included and also the references I have already mentioned. The Mountain Seas is one of the best sources too because it helps us compare what it has been done up to the moment. I'd want to establish a two simplistic division of West and non-Western countries. But for you to understand me, I have only been able to find a testimony, which you can see here. Spargh is Sierra de Tuguel in the Tuguel mountain range, where only it's spoken about one person who participates in the Arab world and North African combatants specifically. So Amal Ramsey's documentary, it's the first one that has been devoted to this participation. This film director, who actually was trained in Spain, partly, knew about this Palestinian who participated in the Spanish International Brigade thanks to the reading of the works by Paradeira and Barafouli, amongst others. So we have a first example of that lack of knowledge in the Arab world has been solved by the reading and this analysis in Spain. So she decides to get in touch with this person's family. She reads a little bit more about the personal and work career of Najat-e-Sequil. And she interviews Sequil's two daughters, one in Moscow, one in Athens. And she creates this corpus so that she can develop the project. It was funded by the Arab Foundation in Granada. And this director had to launch a crowdfunding campaign online, which has delayed the post-production up until this year, 2018. So hopefully in the Cartago Film Festival from the 3rd to the 10th of December this year, it will be presented. It will be shown. Why Sequil? Because we have his memories, which have been partially translated by Nevis Paradeira. It is true that we can question a few chapters. We have some data that historically are not true or are a little bit incomplete. But the important of Najat-e-Sequil is that he represented the Arab community in the brigades. And he did Republican propaganda so that Arabs who walked on Franco's files for them to join the Republican files. And at the same Republican troops, and at the same time, this is the paradox, he wanted to convince the Republicans that it was worthwhile trying this propaganda and that not all Moorish were on the Franco's side. And this second task is really giving him a bigger headache. This is what he tells in his memoirs. Born in Jerusalem, he was a journalist. And he got in touch with the local Communist Party when he was working at the post office. So he became an activist. And he was prosecuted under the British mandate and finally he went to Moscow. And in 1936, he moved to Spain to be in charge of the propaganda and type fascism. Through Pogbo Girona, he accessed Spain as a volunteer for five months. He was in the Madrid front, on the Madrid front. And the sentence that can summarize his ideas. And it's quite similar to the Yugoslav and American veterans, is that he came here to fight in favor of democracy. He says, I'm an Arab volunteer, but I came to Madrid to fight for freedom, to defend Damascus in Guadalajara, Jerusalem in Córdoba, Baghdad in Toledo, El Cairo in Cadiz, and Tetzuan in Burgos. I need to read what he said when he arrived in Barcelona. I got to the wonderful and magnificent Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, of a great civilization. I started walking the streets with orange trees blossoming, the class of trees that we know of as a busufio. They seemed to be illuminated with red lights. And all of a sudden, I came across some militias. Their boss came to me and he spoke to me in Spanish and said, why don't you join us? Smiling, I answered back in French because I was really enthusiastic and I said, I'm an Arab volunteer and I'm here to defend Damascus in Guadalajara, Jerusalem in Córdoba, Baghdad in Toledo, El Cairo in Cadiz, and Tetzuan in Burgos. And he said that with the typical way of speaking, this wonderful way of speaking they have. On his face, he seemed to be surprised and very happy and in a very broken French, he said, are you truly Arabian? Are you really Amor? Amorish, that's not possible.  The people from Morocco that are against the Republic are offending with their behavior the Islam. And they only represent themselves. They have been misled. The army of the people from our front has misled them. And they were really surprised at my words and started shaking their heads as if they could not believe what they were hearing or as if they were doubting on my words. This is the typical stereotype of the Moorish that was still prevalent at the time. He published in media like El Mundo Obrero, for example. And he was sent to Córdoba to try to convince from the trenches those national front Arabs to switch to the Republican troops. And he still insists that it was incompatible with Islam. After a terrible failure, he decides that for propaganda to be really more successful, he needed to go to the Argel to avoid that at the point of origin of the recruitment. That is to say, Morocco. They can have all these people going to fight against the Republic. But the French did not allow him to go there. And eventually, he had to go to Damascus, but he continued alerting in the media about the dangers of fascism. To this personal career, there is also a drama because a dramatic ending. Because when he came back, he started getting in trouble. And he started having some differences with the Communist Party and the Soviet authorities, to the extent that his daughter, Julia, who was in an orphanage in Moscow, he could not see here until 25 years later. So the family started to move around. They tried to come back to Jerusalem, but it was impossible because there was the Israeli occupation. And they ended up in another civil war, or an intervention. And finally, they ended up in Athens. And that is the story that is told in the documentary film through the testimonials of the two daughters who remember Cirque. OK, quantifying. And in this case, I need to talk about the sources that we're familiar with. Because the international brigades had these people participating, but they were also in the aviation and in other tasks. So there is a problem, as I was saying, when it comes to the origin. We really need to understand source by source where these people really came from. And it is especially complex in the case of people from Maghreb. Because Borafoul, for example, offers a list of 89 people who are considered to be French. But within them, among them, there are many people from Morocco, Orgel, or Tunisia. And we have not been able to classify these people yet. It is true, though, that most of them come from Maghreb, from Morocco. And it's obvious, of course. First of all, because of the big presence in France and their link to the left wing communist movements. So people from Morocco, from Orgel, from Morocco, if the authorities did not allow to have propaganda, of course, from the French protectorate in Morocco, it was not easy either to counterattack this enlisting of people in the other side. People from Tunisia, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. And please allow me to say how painful it is that Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, they came here to fight in favor of democracy. And it's so painful to me, so hurtful to see how they are now. So the recovery of their memory of these brigaders should also make us think of this participation in democracy. And we all have to repent upon what we're doing right now in the present, in the other crisis that we're facing. There was an ideology background that has some connections with colonialism. We're talking about Mondays, French Mondays in Syria. For example, Iraq was formerly independent, but with a pro-British policy, colonialism in Maghreb, colonialism in Morocco. And we also had the influence of the Non-Intervention Committee. And as you know, it was questionable. And at the same time, and from the ideology point of view, there was a huge emergence of left-wing movements in the Arabic world. Of course, not all political views are religious. There are, in these countries, there are worker movements. There are left-wing movements. They have always been there. And they're still there in the Arab world. We have some writers from Syria and Palestine who published, at the time, some books, again, Fashem in general, and Spanish Fashism in particular. Of course, they're not translated yet. And let me give you some examples from Iraq, from the seed-breed database where I could find photos. So we have Arab family, middle class with a training in Massachusetts, for example. That's one of them. A member of the Communist Party, General Directorate, some articles published in favor of the Palestinian cause. And he was arrested because of his political activities. From his exile in Paris, he became a member of the Lincoln Brigade and fought in the Arab battle. And finally, he was sent to the United States. Another member from Iraq with Hebrew family. There's a big contrast. And he, of course, there are people like this. And he came from Argentina. And same thing. He ended up participating in the same brigade. And he ended up being sent back home. We have some examples from Palestinian members of the Communist Party, like Najaf Zitrik. But we also have Ali Abdel-Halik, who's a blue collar and who was imprisoned in Palestine. Because of his political idea, he was injured in the Teruel battle, and then he died at the hospital. And then we have another one, who was a member of the worker movement. Hafiz, for example, wrote the French CGT. And at the end, he disappeared in the Ebro battle. Another man from Egypt. Again, this time linked to the British Communist Party. He studied in Cambridge. The strange thing in this case is that he was supposed to have disappeared, but he ended up appearing on a boat going to the United Kingdom. But he ended up deserting. OK, people from Argelia, from the Argel, we have all these people, these 500 volunteers, who created all these links with trade union movements. One of the most well-known is Mohamed Belaydi, who became a machine gun expert. And he participated in these defense of international brigades. And he is the one who appears in the documentary film that I mentioned before. He's the only witness that could be found on the Arab Brigade presence in Spain. We also have Raba Wecidum, who was a member of this battalion that was mixed. And he also died in the Ebro battle. OK, what happens with the participation from brigaders from Morocco? The figures are really difficult to ascertain. We have been working a lot, but we cannot find a figure that has evidence. Castells, for example, mentions 200 volunteers from Morocco. But Sancho Ruano says again, 200. But most came from France. And among them, about 10, between three and 10, from Tangier. Tangier, let's remember, there's an international institute, I'm stated there, sorry, with some legal characteristics that are very different. We also have some Jewish people and people enrolled from Marseille as representatives of these people coming from the Metropolis. Hashmesh Hassan, who was sent to Bordeaux and ended up in Tangier. We also have people who were permanently, more or less, permanently living in Spain. Some of them played a very important role, like Muhammad al-Hassan al-Wazami. But this information that Brathoun says is questioned by path. And not all historians agree, because this man, Muhammad al-Hassan al-Wazami, according to the evidence, did not play an active role in favor of the international brigades. But he fought for the maintenance of the republic and the democratic regime in Spain. But not in particular, he was not a member of the international brigades, according to some historians. There were some people who deserted. That is true. Maybe it was for secret efforts, or maybe it was because what they said in Africa was not true. And then among the curious testimonials, we have a letter of an Australian volunteer, Cormac McCarthy. Please excuse me for my English, where Palmer says that he said the following. I have a colleague who's a young Moor who came with us in October with four more colleagues and some equipment. So even in the databases, we should explore, because we don't have all the information. This is a sample of the propaganda that we're given on the front. And it comes from the Hispanic-Moroccan association that was created when he came to Spain with the two goals that I mentioned before, achieving the Moroccan desertion, but also making Spanish people realize that the Moroccan were not a site of the conflict on themselves, but that they had been forced to fight. And this has been studied. There are many colleagues who have realized that a good part of the people enrolled were coerced. They were threatened. They were in a way economically forced, because there was a huge famine. And of course, some of them ended up coming to Spain to fight because of these problems they had. So I will skip this slide, but I now go to the association that failed on its task. But the most interesting thing is that the stereotypes that Republicans had about Arab people are still there in a journalist of a Russian newspaper that referred to the stealing as exclusively done by Morocans when we know that this was not the case, that it was not only the people from Morocco who did all these crimes and who used all these tactics at the war time. By means of conclusion, I can tell you that the importance of projects like Cibrin and Amal Ramsey's initiatives are important because there's also the interest of researchers. And both archivists, Arab historians, we all necessary have to join our projects in interdisciplinary projects so that we can shed some light on a topic that is absolutely important those days. And of course, archives, like Vora Ful, this has proven that archives are basic with all the difficulties that are there, access problems, catalogization problems, conservation or preservation issues, and so on. Argentinian and Palestinian were the main brigaders, but there were Arab brigaders in the Spanish civil war.  It is therefore important to reveal our stereotypes and the stereotypes we have about the more. These moreish, more stereotypes have to be fought again. Thank you very much for your attention.


So, everyone, my name is Nick Vogelblum, and I'll be your host today, I suppose. I'd like to begin by acknowledging country. I'm on a beautiful Wurundjeri country where summer has finally arrived, and I would like to pay my respect to their elders, past and present, and also to acknowledge all the many Aboriginal lands we're meeting on today, one of these spaces, give us a kind of virtual space that's held, but we're all on unceded land, so thank you for joining us. To any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues with us on the call, we're very welcome, and thank you for joining us. Hopefully, you're in the right space. This is part three of four in our design and evaluation learning sprint from the Australian Evaluation Society, and I'm part of the, I suppose, organising group or committee. I don't think we're a committee. We're a group of people who are interested in it, and if you are interested in joining our group of interested people, please do reach out. But we've been running these sprints for the last, I think this is like the third year we've done them, and we find that bringing in different people who are at that kind of intersection of design and evaluation, whatever that looks like, to kind of share some of the things that they're learning about and the things that are keeping them busy and working on. And we've got a really great speaker for you today. I do encourage you to sign up for tomorrow's session as well. And we've got one more left in the sprint with Luke Craven on systems thinking and design. So that's there as well. These are all free. We give our time for free. Niko's giving us time for free. So, you know, bear with us and hopefully you have some some questions and some some engagement in this. The the kind of, I suppose, the program as it stands is that I'm going to introduce Niko and then Niko's going to give us a presentation and we've I'd love you to gather questions and thoughts as you go through. Please feel free to use the chat to kind of give those questions over or wait until the end of the presentation. And then we'll try and have a bit of a discussion towards the end of the session. So I'm really pleased to introduce a different speaker, I think, for the Australian Evaluation Society. This is Niko King joining us here. He's the co-founder and director of Chaos Theory Games. Hopefully you've read a bit about him anyway by signing up to this. But Niko does all things on AR, VR, mobile games for different organisations. And I think organisations that many of us have worked with this world world food program, DFAT and Samsung as well. So kind of from all different sectors. He's going to talk a bit about. Oh, I don't know what he's going to talk about. He's going to tell us, but but Niko kind of comes in that space between the educational and psychological benefits of games, which I think is a really interesting space for us to be talking about in evaluation as well. So I'm going to stop there and and hand over to you, Niko. I think you've got you should have sharing permission. So go for it if you've got slides and anyone if you've got problems with tech, just reach out to me on the chat. OK. Is that coming through? Awesome. Thank you for the introduction, Nick. And thank you everybody for having me here today. I'm excited to talk to you all about video games and whether or not they're effective tools. My yeah, my background and experience is in starting a game development studio that specialises in creating games that solve real world problems. My my experience isn't in evaluation necessarily. But what I'm hoping to do today is share with you some information about why games are really powerful tools, as well as how we might measure specific data within games and how that can be used to evaluate the efficacy of games themselves and show you a few example projects of what we've done in the past. So starting off a little bit of background into myself. I'm one of the co-founders of Chaos Theory Games. We specialise in creating games that solve real world problems. And our vision is to improve quality of life and inspire a more sustainable future through the magic of play. As Nick mentioned, we've worked with organisations and large companies all across the world. We've created e-learning experiences, games for health, social change projects. So all of them are really focused on some sort of core problem that games can be used to help solve. We also have quite a bit of experience in just the purely entertainment game side of game development, where the collection of our mobile games has been downloaded over 70 million times. And we've found that working in that space, just pure entertainment, we've picked up a lot of tools and a lot of experience that we can bring into the sort of transformational games industry and that can be used to solve real world problems. So there's this really good relationship between those two industries where there's a lot of innovation happening in entertainment games and we can bring that into more social good or education focused projects.  It's the same term or the same concept as serious games, which a lot of people would be familiar with, or games for good or impact games. It's all the same focus where you're looking to solve a real world problem using a game. The primary purpose lies outside of pure entertainment. We really like the term transformational games as we think it's more descriptive of the sorts of experiences that we create. We're looking to create some sort of transformation within the player or within the broader world. And it's also just a bit more inspirational or motivational within serious games. Serious games can sound a little bit boring. So an introduction into transformational games, I think video games is so broad and so diverse as a field. And it's almost an oversimplification for the amazing technology we have at our fingertips. We can create, we can have experiences where it's a text based narrative adventure where you're exploring the future of climate change or you've got a rocket science simulation where you're looking to learn about rocket science and play around with how to build rockets or you're creating a VR horror experience that's just designed to make people terrified. So what do those look like? Up in the top left is the Financial Times Climate Game and it's a text based narrative adventure where you see the impact of different decisions now and how they play out in the future. Below that is Among Us, which is a social deception game. So you're really just looking to deceive other people and trick them and lie to them. And it's all about that sort of social interaction between the players. Below that is Kerbal Space Program which is a rocket science simulation game that was built as an entertainment product but is also enjoyed by people who work at NASA and has been used in the classroom. So it's a really fun and interesting game that I really enjoy. Candy Crush is up in the top left. That's a mobile game that I'm sure quite a few people would be familiar with, played just for fun. Below that Monopoly, I'm sure everybody's familiar with that one. Interesting story about Monopoly is it was originally designed by a communist who was looking to show the negative impacts of capitalism where one person would just go around the board, get all of the assets and then have all the money at the end of the game. Everybody else ends up with nothing. And it was originally called Landlord and considering that it turned out to be the most successful board game all time and make Hasbro a lot of money. It's a little bit ironic how that one turned out. And below that is Alien Isolation which is an absolutely terrifying virtual reality experience that's just built purely for horror. Then there's two of our games in the middle. Kengizu is a game that we developed for DFAT and it's a wildlife simulation game where you go around and explore Australia's national parks and collect and rescue and rehabilitate animals and then release them back into the wild. Below that is Shamilla, which is a game that we developed for the United Nations Board of Food Program and it was designed to help educate and train their staff how to design better policy and make sure that they're helping people. And so that's a sort of safe and simulated training environment where people are free to explore different ideas and different decisions without the sort of lives of people weighing on those decisions. So it really lets them experiment. So yeah, I think the reason that I wanted to run through all of those is just to show you the sort of broad spectrum of what games can be. And whenever I'm talking about games in this presentation, I'm talking about anything from a text-based adventure through to a simulation, through to a board game or something that's just played for fun. In terms of the different types of transformational games, I just wanted to go through some broad categories as it might help put into context the sorts of experiences that we would typically develop that you might be able to apply to a use case. So educational games is a huge one. We do a lot of work for the education industry. That might be for sort of school students, but it can also be education and training for the workplace and games can be a really good use there. Training simulations, that's huge in the workplace and lets us practice real-world skills in a safe simulated environment without the risk of failure, essentially. Or without the risk of failure impacting things outside of the game environment. Behavior change games is an area where games are particularly well suited for. So whether or not we're building new behaviors or changing old behaviors that are negative or that we wanted to get rid of. Games have a lot of tools in order to form new habits. Mobile games in particular are really good at tapping into our motivation and creating some habitual play of you come back to this app at the same time every day. And that can be good for when the behavior change that you're looking for takes place over a longer period of time. Games for health. This could be games for fitness or personal health but also for rehabilitation or in a medical context. Games are often used in hospitals to instead of pain treatments or an additional pain treatments. In some hospitals when kids are getting band-aids changed they get a game and that's been shown to be a lot more effective at reducing pain and reducing anxiety and stress. When compared to other options. Empathy games. So games that are looking to help develop empathy with another person or another group of people. Games are particularly well suited for this area because of the active nature of play where when we step into a game we experience it in the first person. We say I completed the level or I walked down the corridor. You're not observing somebody else go through that experience. It's really active and you're an active participant in that. So games have the capacity to let us walk a mile in somebody else's shoes and it makes them quite well suited for empathy building and empathy development. Citizen science games. So games can be a really good tool for if you're conducting research and you want to get a good data set. I know of some examples of games that have been used to gather water level data and river systems and then that's been used as part of science. Sorry, part of scientific studies. So yeah, citizen science games is another good category. And then impact games is sort of a patch all if a game is looking to have a broader impact social change games might fall into this category. Games that are looking to address some issues with climate change or saving more energy could be considered an impact game. So when do we use games? For the next section, I just wanted to look at some of the benefits and the challenges of games. So when are games useful and what are the challenges of implementing a game? Games certainly aren't a silver bullet and aren't applicable in every single use case. So hopefully through this section I'll give you a bit more information so you can make an informed decision of is a game right for this particular use case. Games can be really good for boosting engagement. They can translate complex topics into engaging and memorable stories or worlds that kind of immerse us. The human attention span has dropped drastically over the past 20 years because there is so much going on on the internet and there's so many things jumping for our attention. So if we needed to connect with an audience to hold their attention for a longer period of time games could be a good way of doing that. They can motivate behavior change. I touched on this earlier where games have a lot of tools to draw the player in and keep them playing for a long period of time. If anybody's played any mobile games you'll know that you get these notifications every day and if you get in the habit of playing that game every single day then it just becomes part of your routine. So that can be an area where games can be or those tools can be applied to healthcare or fitness or eating the right foods. All those tools can be used for behavior change. The practical application of skills and skills development. So games are great at training problem recognition and problem solving skills as well as increasing social skills or simulating different social situations. There are quite a few studies online of people who play online competitive games and the ways in which games improve those communication skills and make them better leaders. And games also kind of follow the mantra you learn by doing and then you get to apply that learning and see the results of the application of your knowledge and use that to update your hypothesis about how our system works. And that process, that experiential learning process is one of the strengths of games. Prolong of attention. So this is similar to motivating behavior change. If you have a particular use case where you need to keep an audience engaged for a long period of time, a game could be a way where you can get the person emotionally invested in the experience and get them coming back. You could form that habit over a long period of time. We're working on a project in the adherence, medical adherence space. And it's really important for the people who are gonna be using the experience to come back and use this game every single day in order to maintain adherence over the course of years. So that's a case where games can be quite beneficial. Widespread platforms and reach. Digital games can be distributed to billions of people pretty much instantly. So app stores, the app store or Google Play or through websites or through steam and consoles and other platforms. There's a huge potential audience. So if you need to get this project out to people and connect with them and distribute the project, they have a huge capacity for that scale. Instant feedback. I think this is a huge strength of games where if you're going through an experience you can know right away whether or not you're doing an action or activity or whether or not the answers that you give are right or wrong. If you were training a particular skill in a simulation, the potential you're using VR and you need to use a tool in a particular way, the person the very first time that they're practicing that skill, they know whether or not they're doing it right or whether or not they're doing it wrong. And that prevents them from forming bad habits or have bad behaviors and can let them adjust and I guess shorten that learning feedback loop where they can improve and make sure that they're doing things the right way. Personalization at scale. I think this is a really interesting aspect of games where it is a very intimate and personal experience when you're playing a game and the game can respond and be tailored to your particular skill level or where you're up to in your learning or development journey. So a very simple example of this is if you've got 10 levels that cover the learning syllabus, somebody who knows the learning syllabus would be able to move through it very quickly and then maybe they get to the harder levels much faster and then they're challenged and they're at an appropriate skill level whereas somebody who is maybe not familiar or doesn't understand some of the core concepts, they get stuck on level two and the game can recognize that and acknowledge, oh, that you've been here for a longer period of time than you should be. We've recognized that you don't understand these fundamental concepts. Here are some links to some external resources or here's a video of some of the learning content that you might not understand. So it's really that ability to respond and adapt and personalize the experience to each individual participant can be a really powerful use case. Measurable outcomes. Games are great at tracking all sorts of data about how we're using a game or our performance within the environment and that can be good for evaluation but it could also be good for the player and their learning or their development where they get that feedback, they understand their results, they understand their marks in real time and they can adjust their approach accordingly. Gathering valuable data, I guess the depth and the type of data that we can gather within a game environment I don't know, I'm not gonna say it's limitless but you can gather a very amazing amount of data. So if you wanted to measure how long people dwell in a particular space or where they take particular actions or lots of information about demographics or usage, there are just a lot of different data points and then that data can be analyzed, processed and reported on in a somewhat automated fashion. So some data points that might be too challenging or time consuming to record within the physical world might be easier to do in a virtual world. And I believe this is the last point, a safe environment. So games allow you to experiment, they allow you to fail, they allow you to try options that you wouldn't normally try in a real world environment. And this also allows people to sort of push their limits. So if you were training to land aircraft, if you're in a 747 simulator, you could push the limits and see like where the breaking point is, where if you were training in a real world scenario, you wouldn't be able to push those limits, you wouldn't be able to see where the breaking point is. So you wouldn't learn as quickly, you wouldn't know when to expect danger as well as if you had gone through some of those scenarios where you had failed and learned from those lessons. So those were some of the benefits, but there are also challenges that we face when we're using games. Games can be, it can be very difficult to teach highly specific or technical content. I guess when we're developing a game, we need to program in or figure out every single use case or every single possible answer or configuration of the way that people are going to interact with it. And if it's a very specific or technical subject matter, it might be that there are 100 different ways to answer this question or do this activity. And it might just be that developing a game or a simulated environment for this isn't going to be an effective use of time and just doing in-person facilitation or more traditional learning methods might be more effective for that particular use case. Referencing, so games don't work like a textbook. With a textbook, you can kind of flip it open, flip to the page that you know that the formula's on, look at the formula, write it down and then get on with your day. It's a very quick process. Finding a particular section in a game where you learned a particular concept can be really challenging. It'd be common to, oh, you have to open up the game. Maybe there's a level select tool where you can go and find the right level, but then maybe you have to play through five to 10 minutes of a level in order to find that one section. And at that point, it's all too difficult and I'm just not going to bother with it. It's also difficult to reference it if you were doing like a research paper or if you needed to send a particular section to somebody else. You can't just send a section of a game to somebody else. You could potentially record a video and send that across, but because of the interactive nature of games, maybe that's not going to be as effective or actually achieve what you're looking to with that. Personal preferences, just like with everything else, people have personal preferences and that applies to games. Some people will like a particular style of game and because it's interactive and it's kind of driven by the player, those personal preferences are more exaggerated in their enjoyment or their willing participation in the experience.  Is there anything else about personal preference? Oh, this also applies to maybe a similar point but digital literacy. So this is a big one for the projects that we work on where two people might have the same personal preferences but one of them is very adept at digital literacy. They have played a lot of games and the other person might be very new to games or has never played games in their life. Trying to design a game that works the same for both of those people is very challenging because the person who has low digital literacy might be confused and overwhelmed and the person who has high digital literacy might be a little bit bored or think that it needs to be more challenging or have more features and functionality in it. So it is really good to understand who your target audience is so you can develop an experience for them. And there are certainly ways around the digital literacy component. They can be expensive to produce for a niche audience. So there is certainly an overhead in developing a game. There's a lot of design work and software development work and art production work that's required. And if you've got a niche audience of 30 to 100 people that are gonna be playing this experience it's probably just gonna be more cost effective to do some other form of engagement in person physical facilitation or whatever it needs to be. Transformational games aren't created fundraising. We've been approached for a few projects where the desired goal was to use either a sales price or microtransactions in the game in order to fund the experience itself. It's certainly possible, but essentially you've got a split focus where you're looking to raise funds and then you're also looking to have some sort of change or solve some sort of problem. And you need to have a priority on each of those. So which one is more important and that splits your focus and you end up usually doing both poorly. And you're also competing with entertainment games where the only purpose they have is to generate as much money as possible. So the option of what the player engages with and where they spend their money usually goes towards the projects of the games that are specialized in a particular area. Unique capacity to iterate and it usually requires a long timeline. So if you've got a month to put together a project, games probably aren't the right tool. There's just, again, an overhead in the design time and building and developing and iterating on the experience where you need at least sort of four months minimum is what we would usually recommend. But for a more complex project or when you're dealing with a very sensitive subject matter or other situations might need longer, maybe it's 12 months. Those are sort of common timelines. And it's also very important to be able to iterate, to be able to get feedback from users to be able to update your approach, learn from the feedback that you're getting and then improve the experience based on that. You need a distribution plan. So developing a fun, exciting game with a noble purpose isn't enough. You really need to understand how to communicate with your target audience and how to communicate the value of what you're working on to that target audience.  So those were a few benefits and challenges of, games have a different time. Those are a few benefits and challenges of games but games don't need to just stand alone. They can be part of a broader strategy and work together with other initiatives or activities in order to achieve your objective. So you've got the digital game, maybe you also have text-based learning resources that do explain the dense, complex learning content beforehand. Maybe you've got a video series that has somebody playing through the game and explaining it for anybody that has low digital literacy. Maybe they could engage with that video content instead. Maybe you've got some sort of workshops or in-person facilitation for, I guess condensing that learning and letting people teach others about what they have got out of this game. So yeah, whenever you're designing a game you can always rely on these other tools, these more traditional methods in order to create a more effective approach for your initiatives. So I thought it'd be good to talk about a few example projects that we've worked on to put some of this in context. So this came as the project that I mentioned previously that we developed for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the objective of this game was to appeal to international students and get international students interested in studying university subjects in Australia, being interested in ecology and environmental science subjects. So the way that we did it is we created a game that was appealing to the target audience.  So the game itself then has a lot of links out to external resources where you could learn more about these animals or you could, there were characters in the game that studied at Australian universities and had bios and there was information about the different universities that are researching these areas. There's information about what research was happening. There's an encyclopedia filled with entries and fun facts. So it's really about capturing that initial interest and getting people emotionally invested in these animals in this environment and then providing avenues for them to further that learning and that education. So through the game, we measured a 10% increase in intent to visit Australia after 20 minutes of play. So when we can distribute this to thousands of people across the world, we can really, I guess, change people's minds about a career or potentially change people's future trajectory for what they were going to study. The next project that I wanted to touch on was In Their Shoes. So this is a game that we developed for Takeda pharmaceuticals and Takeda wanted to create a game that helped their staff build empathy with sufferers of IBD. And the game itself is a augmented reality game or a role-playing game where you take on different challenges that look to simulate some of the trials and tribulations of living with IBD. So you might get a notification saying, you know, run to the bathroom right now in the next five seconds or else you fail the game or you need to drive home in order to pick up a new pair of change of clothes. You need to take a photo of it, then you need to drive back. You're in the middle of a meeting, but it has to happen right now. You don't have any other options. So Takeda did an evaluation study of this project. There's information down the bottom if you wanted to look up how they approached that. But yeah, it showed that there were statistically significant increases in IBD understanding and connection to patients, empathy and pro-social job prospects. And it encouraged patient perspective taking and a strong desire to promote patient advocacy and reduce stigma around chronic illness. So a fairly simple premise for a game, but really good at helping build empathy and open people's eyes and broaden their perspectives. So from just those few examples, we can see that games can help inspire us and get us interested in new subject matter. They can potentially change our career path. They can help us see a different perspective or help build empathy with people in a different situation for ourselves. The field of games is very, very broad and that's just a few examples of some games that are solving real world problems. But how do we know that they're effective? So I thought it'd be good to quickly run through some different examples of scientific studies that have been done into different areas of games being used to solve real world problems. The industry of games is very broad and the transformational games industry or field is only about 20 years old. So I've never seen any overarching evidence of games are good in all use cases or scenarios. All of the evidence I've seen is quite niche and focused on a particular area. So I'd say if you're interested in looking into this more, Google the specific use case that you have in mind and look for evidence in that space. But games have been shown to improve teamwork and cooperation with others, improve management skills, simulation and learning physical world skills. There's lots of research into how simulation games have been used in the workplace and how effective they are. Games can improve problem solving and logic skills, planning, resource management and logistic skills, inductive reasoning and hypothesis testing, perseverance. I think perseverance is an area where they've done a lot of studies not necessarily into transformational games, but just gamers in general. And it's been shown that gamers have much higher perseverance or ability to continue in the despite of adversity. And a lot of that is because when you play a game, you have an agreement with the game that if I try hard enough, if I keep trying, I will eventually be able to overcome this challenge. And that isn't necessarily the case in the physical world. Sometimes life perseverance doesn't actually get you any need to be. But it is a valuable skill or behavior to exhibit and does help in a lot of scenarios. And games can really help emphasize that or train that. Games have also been shown to improve memory, hand-eye coordination and multitasking. So how do we measure the efficacy in games? Ideally, when we're working on a game, when we're working on, let's say an education game, measuring the efficacy is fairly straightforward. We can look at direct data capture and direct observation and we can use that to evaluate whether or not the students had again the knowledge. I thought it'd be useful to go through some typical data points that we look at in some of our projects, just to give you an idea about what sort of data we're gathering and how that's been used by different parties. So the completion rate of content, how far are they getting through the different levels? What score did they get on different levels? The usage data, so when did they sign in, how frequently, how long did they stick around for? Demographics can be very useful for cross-ferencing against some of these other data points, where the user is looking. So in a recent project, we tracked the position of the mouse on the screen and used that to record where the user was interested and what they were considering. They were considering options A or options B and this was used in a study where they were looking at if changing the text prompts in the questions had an impact on people's decision-making and then they surveyed people afterwards and they essentially identified that even though people said that it didn't impact the decision-making, in reality, the data showed that everybody's decision-making was impacted by some small changes in the language that was being used. This could also be applied to virtual reality. So in the latest virtual reality headsets, they have eye-tracking in them so we can literally see where people are looking at all times. So if you had a particular use case where you wanted to track where people are looking in an environment or where they're looking in a room, that could be something that you track in these simulated spaces. Whether players stopped interacting with the experience or where they left the experience, this is often used to improve the content or we see that a large portion of players were leaving in the middle of the level. What is it about that spot? Maybe we confused them or maybe they didn't know what to do and we can use that to improve the experience. The value of different variables. So this is something we've done for different research projects where we made it very easy to configure variables and run different experiments and then those variables were tracked in the analytics platform and could be cross-referenced against all of the other data. So making that sort of A-B testing a lot more straightforward and somewhat automated on the reporting side. External changes in behavior. So if we can monitor whether or not people are acting in a particular way or surveying them to see if there's changes in behavior, external changes in performance. So if we have a game that's being used in the workplace, it's good to potentially we're monitoring their job performance or how they're doing in a particular task. And it could also be that we look at group A, like played the game for this long. How do they compare against another group that didn't play the game? And then pre and post launch tests commonly use those for educational projects. Very easy to run in a classroom environment and just get an early indication of whether or not we're achieving learning outcomes. Nick, how am I doing for time? I think you're okay. Why don't you keep going for a bit? Well, maybe we can stop in 10, two and folks, if you have questions for Niko, please drop them in the chat or have them ready and we can get up there. But yeah, please keep going. Cool. Yeah, 10-2 sounds perfect. So yeah, next slide. I kind of just wanted to put up a few examples of some interesting data sets that have been produced from games that might give you some ideas. As I mentioned, evaluation isn't my specialty, but my hope is that by showing you all these different data sets, it can spark some ideas and some creativity of different use cases. So on screen at the moment, up in the top right is World of Warcraft. And a while ago, they had a bug in the game where an effect sort of got out of containment that acted a lot like a virus. It got passed from person to person and damaged their health until they eventually died. And what ended up happening was it got out of control, the sort of capital cities or the areas of dense population emptied out. Players themselves set up quarantine zones like healers went around trying to save people and stop them from dying. And this all just organically happened and evolved. They also had just bad actors that were going around intentionally trying to spread it. And it's just this really interesting scenario, but researchers actually contacted the developers, Blizzard, and they got access to the dataset. And that was actually used in a few different research studies to understand how do viruses spread? So this is a way where because so much data is being attract in these games, we can get this really interesting insight into areas of data that we wouldn't feasibly be able to track in the real world. And that can be done on a huge scale and then that can be sort of automatically processed and analyzed. And in the middle of the top of the screen is a game called Fold It. So that's a citizen science project where it's essentially a puzzle game that players try and solve these protein folding puzzles. And the solutions to those puzzles were used by researchers in order to develop new drugs and cancer treatments. But in a matter of months, the players of this game were able to solve some problems that have been stumping scientists for years. So that's not necessarily tracking data within the game, but it's getting the players to produce some sort of end product that can be used in research and training. I'll jump over that one. Theory of change, I'll assume that everybody here is familiar with the theory of change. And it's not my area of expertise, so I'm not gonna try and explain to everybody, but it is a useful tool that we've used in some of our projects where we weren't able to directly measure the end outcome that we were looking to get. We've worked on a few environmental sustainability thing projects, and the end results we wanted were sort of behavior change and reduction in CO2 emissions. And we didn't have the capacity in order to do a huge evaluation study. So we used the theory of change to get a basic model for how much impact we were having and whether or not the actions or the activities that we were taking were heading in the right direction. So that's definitely a good tool to consider if you're working on a game project. And very final point, the transformational framework. So if you're interested in working on a game in the space or working on a project in the space or you just wanna learn more, you're just curious, I would highly recommend the transformational framework. It's a free online e-book that can be downloaded. There's a little URL down in the bottom right of the screen. But essentially it's eight different components that are critical to the success of a transformational game. It's where we picked up to transformational games over serious games and was developed by Shell Labs over in the States. And it also just does a good job of sort of laying out the game development process, the different steps that are involved, what different parties are there and how they all interact with one another. So the transformational framework focuses on the following eight points. So high level purpose. So what are you looking to accomplish? This is mainly for your internal team to keep everybody aligned and to make decision making easier and more straightforward. We can say, yes, this is aligned with the high level purpose or this isn't. Audience and context. You really need to know who your audience is and it's very common that we get brought on for a project and the target audience is everybody. If we're designing a game for everybody, we're actually designing a game for nobody because we can't listen to a particular group's feedback and design a game to appeal to them. We end up having to make something that's bland and unappealing. So when you do have a broad audience, it's always a good idea to try and start with a small subset of that and then expand out because it'll allow you to get to an effective end result a lot quicker. Player transformations, specifically, what transformation are you looking to have within the player or maybe multiple transformations? What barriers exist to the player having those transformations? Is access to the game going to be a barrier is underlying pre-existing beliefs going to be a barrier? Domain concepts, so what information is contained within the domain concepts that you're dealing with? What's going to be in the game itself? Like what knowledge is in the game? What's the prior knowledge that we're assuming the player is coming to this experience with? And what concepts have we acknowledged but said we're not going to deal with those at this stage? We're just going to focus on these ones. Expert resources or subject matter experts are critical for projects in this space where they need to be able to advise and say when something is right or wrong or that is right enough or maybe we should just not deal with this concept right now and we can leave that one out. Prior works, are there other games or movies or documentaries or websites or books that have tackled a similar challenge to what you're looking to tackle? Can we look at how they have succeeded or failed? Can we rely on them to be like a component in what we're doing where we're referring to them or referencing them? And then finally, assessment plan. I'm sure that everybody here would remember to do an assessment plan but it sometimes gets forgotten in other contexts and it's definitely one of the most critical components of understanding whether or not you're having the impact that you're actually looking to have and using that to inform whether or not you should spend your resources on going down the current path or maybe change your approach and try something new or different. So that is the end of the presentation section. I'd love to hear some questions and if we run out of time and anybody wanted to connect with me on LinkedIn, that's a place to connect with me and I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have. Thanks Nikoi, that was fantastic. Got a couple of questions in the chat. Danielle's asking, I think it was in relation to the capturing of information in the tracking. I think you're talking about the, I forget what game it was, but tracking kind of people's eye movements and where they were looking. Danielle wrote, I guess there are ethics considerations around that. So how do players give permission for that sharing of data? Danielle, if I've misrepresented that, let me know. Yeah, particularly, I think it was the one where you said there was a virus and people acting as healers and then suddenly researchers contact the game makers. So it wasn't necessarily the initial intent that other people came in, which is a little bit different, I think the one where the intent is to find that out. Inflating that. Definitely, there are a lot of ethical considerations with a lot of these projects and I think all of the projects that we work on, that's a consideration and we make sure that we get consent and make sure that the player understands what we're using the data for. And usually for the projects that are used in that capacity, it's very clear that it's either done in a research environment or it's a very clear, potentially it's in the workplace or a similar sort of environment. Yeah, I'm not sure what the ethical considerations were for the World of Warcraft Corrupted Blood example, but there are a few research papers that have been done on it and I believe that they wouldn't have got any identifiable data. I think that they would have been looking at like where people originally got it, how far they traveled, looking at how many contacts they had and how many people they passed on to, data points such as those. Thanks. Thank you. Another question was from Samantha, talking a bit more about the medical adherence game with people coming back every day for several years. That's the question, could you talk a bit more about it? It is still in development. We're hoping to have it launched early next year. So I'll be posting about it when I can. LinkedIn's a good place to stay up to date on that. What can I talk about with it? It is, yeah, it's for chronic illness. It's for creating and maintaining good, healthy habits that help support their chronic illness and they need to essentially do these activities and a lot of people fall off on doing the activities because it can seem futile and we want to create essentially a support network and a social network focused on the specific adherence in order to help people live healthier and longer term lives. If you've got specific questions, I can probably try and talk my way around it but yeah, I can't say too much at this stage, unfortunately. Yeah, no, just thanks, Niko. Yeah, just interested in finding out more about how these games are used and even that's useful information in terms of looking at the potential for evaluation and evaluation capacity building because even what you're saying in terms of building social networks through those games, in terms of for motivation and connection. Yeah, this game is more similar to animal crossing than it is to an action game or an adventure game where it's more of a social space and I think this goes back to the earlier point of games are incredibly diverse and there's just so many types of experiences that whenever we get brought onto a project, we look at all of the different styles of games and oh, we need a social experience that has this cosy, inviting atmosphere that you want to exist within that space. That is a good tool for the job or for the problem that we were looking to address with that one. Thanks, Niko. Another practical question was from Alison on what kind of cost is associated with developing games like these? It depends a lot but in terms of some ballpark figures, it might start from sort of... If you know what you want and it's very simple and straightforward, maybe in the tens of thousands, maybe 50,000 is a good initial jumping off point but those would be very simple, straightforward experiences and as soon as you start getting into, I don't know, 3D or immersive gameplay or especially social features, so any sort of online or interactive features, you're probably looking at hundreds of thousands. As soon as you're talking about like a massively multiplayer online game where everybody connects and it's just in one environment together, what a lot of people think of when they think about video games, so things like Fortnite, you're talking about millions of dollars for an experience like that. But yeah, if you were looking at the Financial Times, I'll see if I can jump back to this one. If you're looking at the Financial Times climate game, then you might be this one. Then it takes back to Narrow Adventure, there's not a whole lot of asset production that's involved. There is a lot of design and whether or not you wanted to be doing a lot of, I guess, iteration of that design, testing with people, looking at the impact goals, that one could become quite expensive. Yeah, I guess there are also multiple points where you'd say, maybe it's 50,000 to develop the prototype for it, but then is there an ongoing maintenance and support component to this where you need to expand or keep on updating it? That's very common for games where you create the proof concept or the initial validation and then you continue to expand on it. So yeah, a lot of it depends on where you draw that line, but definitely tens of thousands, ideally hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, if you're doing something really, really complex. But I mean, usually for most use cases, we advise against those like million-dollar ideas and we just say, there's a far simpler way of actually achieving this where we just scope it down and focus on the core of the experience. And in terms of timelines, yeah, four to 12 months is pretty typical for the projects that we work on. I know whenever we work with government or larger organizations, it's usually a decent amount longer, worked on some projects that are sort of two years long, so it can certainly take a little bit longer. That's great. Thank you. Yes, Alison, I think I'm hearing it depends as well.  Thank you, Nico. Thanks from all of us for sharing these insights. I think it's really interesting to hear from some different perspectives and it's definitely got my brain going around and how we might even begin to evaluate some of this stuff. So thank you. As Nico mentioned, please reach out to him on LinkedIn or connect with him to find out more about these games. Do join us for our session tomorrow if you've got time and please do fill out the survey that I've put in there because we're always trying to think of what do we do next in these sessions as well. So thank you for joining us all and we'll see you soon. Thanks everybody. Nice to see you all and yeah, thanks for having me.


Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. This will also be recorded on YouTube. I'm an uploaded leader In case some people aren't able to save a whole time or need to pop in or out Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started now So I can start by using myself. So my name is Eva Luna part of Keegan I'm the peer advisor for computer science engineering and I'm a junior in computer science engineering I'm from Michigan And yeah, I'm excited to be interviewing Massa today So if you guys want to introduce yourself, maybe tell us a little bit about who you are what your goal is And things like that we can get started So hi, I'm Julie. I'm a sophomore majoring in CS. I'm from California on Massa I'm in charge of the development of a software application for our mission control So that allows us to control things like valves and visualize our sensor data in addition to that I'm also the business lead for Massa. So I'm in charge of getting sponsorships for the team and also it like our marketing and other Other business things like that Hi, I'm Evan. I'm a junior in computer engineering I'm from Michigan. Well, Massa I do mostly hardware stuff. So for design, but also for more development project management that sort of thing Oh, and I'm Jose. I'm the current avionics lead for Massa I'm a senior in aerospace and computer engineering and I'm basically managing all the hardware and software projects here Awesome. Thank you for introducing yourselves And then I guess you started if you guys could tell us a little about what Massa is and what it stands for And what the main goal is or guess your main mission with your project team is right So Massa stands for Michigan Aeronautical Science Association and our main goal is to launch rockets So on a little bit of team history. So before we used to work a lot of solid rockets that means like our Kind of like the propellant we use a solid But now we're moving to liquid rockets, which is way more complex and involves a lot of adding a lot of new stuff to your systems So right now we're trying to launch the first liquid rocket for Massa That's awesome. Okay. That's really cool And then could you tell me a little bit about maybe the different teams that you have? What kind of things they've worked on in the different teams too? So Massa is basically broken down into several teams I can't start with like aerodynamics So on the aerodynamics team basically we do all the simulation of like the shape of the rocket How we're gonna make it like optimized for last drag We do simulation like temperature and we use a lot of like computer aided design software to do that Moving from aerodynamics, we also have at low that stands for assembly test launch and operations And that's the very hands-on team of people like getting the tools cutting the tubes and actually Assembling the rocket and making all the tests necessary So for example, we traveled to the Mojave Desert this summer to test our engine and during that the Ato team was very hands-on like conducting the test and analyzing all the data we needed Apart from that, we have also propulsion which basically designs the engine and also does all the analysis to figure out like the size of The engine the different components we have and also how much trust we need to provide to fly the rocket Besides that we have structures teams that basically work Defining most of the internal structures is structure of the rocket. So like the propellant tanks a few tank a few tank oxidizer tank and they also do like Sometimes they collaborate with aerodynamics doing like the rocket fence which basically stabilize the rocket and I guess besides that of course Avionics which is Everyone here is on Avionics and we deal with all the electrical component and software. So we do a lot of board design We do a lot of embedded software and we also do high-level application And we currently just starting a new software team So we have projects ranging from computer vision to database application to app development And I guess besides that we have the business team Which is like how we reach out to companies how we have like external relations with other companies how we we acquired funding for our projects and Production so production is like the team that basically get all the components and they actually go to the machining shop and build everything I think that's yeah, yeah All the sections That's awesome, thank you And then I kind of want to ask so for you guys Did you guys have prior experience coming into Massa with some of the things that you work on now? Or what kind of skill level do you need to have to join Massa? So before joining Massa, I definitely had experience of coding and working with user interfaces But definitely like not in Python. So that was near to me. I also had never worked with like continuous like incoming packets of data or like Live data visualization. So that was also new to me But I feel like you definitely don't need prior experience to join Massa It's definitely possible to learn as you do it Yeah, that's what most of the members do there aren't very many that come in already knowing things It's kind of you learn as you as you go Right, that's great. What type of ways do you guys do then to teach members? So maybe don't know like anything going into the stuff that you guys do Yeah, so what we try to do specifically for avionics, but I also think for other subteams We schedule like work session times for like projects So that's where more experienced members can talk to the new members and they can like identify the gaps and point out The ways to learn we also have on-boarding tutorials like explaining how to use some tools For example, if you want to join let's say the flight computer project We have an onboarding doc that explains how to download all the tools and how to start collaborating to the to the project Okay, awesome. That's really cool And then you mentioned before that you guys went on some trips and we're testing and things like that Could you tell me more a little bit about that what you did there? What was it like traveling there? Julie like this one. Yeah, so I did go up on to Southern California over the summer So we went down to Mojave Desert for about a week And so the testing site is like legitimately in the desert So we had to stay at like Airbnb is like an hour out And then drive in every day and then drive back And it's pretty cool Even though it is a lot of hard work because I feel like it's the kind of experience that you really Probably wouldn't get anywhere else So it's pretty special. Yeah, like being in the desert in the middle of the night That's awesome and then you have you guys done trips like that before is this like a usual thing that you do every year Or every semester or something So we that's the second trip we do to the Mojave Desert I think we start doing that because now we transition to liquid rockets So it's a little bit more complex and then since we need a test facility that we can like test our engine We start doing that since last year and then we plan should be doing every summer Okay, awesome. Are members sponsored through that or how was that work for like traveling then? So none of the costs have to be paid by students We really try to make sure that everything is covered by the team and so that's part of our business sub team is so important because We try to get funding from other places. That's awesome. That's really cool We also have a lot of local testing too. So it's not all traveling We have a regional or a local location as well for the non-hot fire tests So when we're just running fluids through and we're not igniting anything that can happen in the air Oh, that's cool. Okay, that's awesome And then I want to ask to kind of what companies I was looking at answering before and I see a lot of people usually do internships Or things like that because you're getting hands-on experience. What kind of companies to people typically work at then they're in NASA so so I'm asking would have like Mostly arrow majors. We also have mechanical engineers and Computer engineers. Yes. So for the arrow side people would usually go to the aerospace industry like SpaceX The origin Northrop German Ray young I guess on the computer science side I had the opportunity to work at Amazon also Microsoft during software engineering over the summer and that was definitely like Working at NASA helped me to like fill my resume with projects. So there was a good opportunity and computer engineering side I guess they also mostly go like to the aerospace industry, but to work with a dionics and do hardware I Worked in the automotive industry over the last couple summers at a company that's near here And there's a lot of people that are really interested in the aerospace industry, but that's still around the team So people like that won't necessarily go to those big aerospace companies, but there's a lot of other opportunities for them That kind of helps Awesome, would you say then that some of the skills that you learned from Massa were also applied then to internships that you guys had mentioned that you've done Yeah, absolutely The at least the projects I worked on there's pretty much a one-to-one correspondence between what I worked on over the summer and what I worked on here That's awesome. That's really cool And then with that you mentioned like you were able to put stuff on your resume specifically from Massa Do you guys also work on professional opportunities in Massa kind of like helping people with resumes? Yeah, so we have a leadership team And the vice president is usually responsible for hosting like in full sessions with Massa members and industry And those are usually like specific to the members and yeah People usually reach out because either they're like Massa alumni or they just like are very interested in our work And then we get those opportunities Yeah, and I guess like we also have a website so people get our emails and they constantly send like updates asking for like resume books So for some of our like corporate partners They also come in to visit us and hold like info sessions and recruiting sessions. So recently relativity They make like 3d printed rockets. They came in to have a recruiting session with us. That's really cool That's awesome. And then I guess with that What are some ways then that computer science engineering or computer engineering students like you guys can get involved specifically in Massa You mentioned a new software team. When is that getting started or is it already started and how people join? Yeah, so the software team is already started. We started this semester The way to get involved We have no applications pretty much just like letting us know you're interested in to join we have weekly Meetings for avionics. They're like Monday 6 30 p.m. On GFL 107 So if you just show up to one of those meetings, you'll be able to talk to anyone And it will be happy like to guide you how to get started So specifically talking about the projects on the software team right now We're doing like computer vision application to read Measurement from pressure gauges. We also starting our own app development because like we want members to be like to have a Massa app on their phone where they can say like the calendar have access to our internal wiki and also like have access to test data So they can run any kind of analytics Another project is Yeah, we're also doing our own database engine So basically like instead of starting everything in Google Drive that you can like go and like search for the data We just want to be able like to create a way to sort that efficiently and just like query the data and run analytics very quickly That's awesome. That's really cool. You guys have a lot of cool projects that you're working on So just to reiterate so students can just kind of like show up to those meetings And kind of get started on projects. Is there any specific ones that they have to apply to or they can just join any project They're interested in. Yeah, so there's no application and also something I think is really important to point out is that no previous experience required because we're here to help everyone get started and like Help everyone find what their interests are and we have a lot of previous members that have experience on that So they kind of work as mentors for new members And the the way the meetings kind of work are weekly Monday meetings Those give an overview of every project that we have active right now and also team updates as well So you can kind of see what the rest of the team is working on but during those project updates You can see what's available to work on figure out who the lead is for each of those projects So you have someone to talk to if you're interested in getting involved and you can kind of see where each project is at and where There might be opportunities to join That's also okay. That's perfect And then I guess with that I wanted to ask for you guys who are CS or CE majors What is the time commitment like or how has it been balancing classes with that? I Think it depends on who the person is and also how long they've been on the team Obviously the people that have been on the team tend to be more committed to it. They'll put in more time There also tend to be the people with the leadership position So it kind of naturally goes that way what I'd say for most people that start on the team It's maybe a couple hours a week if that like showing up to meetings and then work sessions So at first a lot of people don't really put in time outside of it So you're kind of getting used to it and then as you get more involved with the team in different projects that tends to increase over time And I think generally we do a pretty good job of balancing, you know School obviously comes first over everything. So it's kind of just something you figure out as you go But it's definitely not like you're fully submerged right away For you guys personally, what are some like tips? I guess that you have then for maybe people who are in CS and like trying to balance classes in the project team What has been like most useful for you? Think something that I use a lot is like I Write down all my deadlines like in a planner calendar where I can see like in one page Everything through all the semester so I can really plan my assignments ahead So and I think that's something they tell you like if you take x280 or x280 ones like start your assignment At the first day and that's true, especially if you're involved in a project team. So like you can actually balance being a moaf Yeah, a lot of members tend to do their work here as well. So it's kind of like another way to As well, so there's a group of people that you know are in the same classes that you can work with That's for and then I guess to close off or like the last question I have is for each of you. What has been your favorite part of mass are your favorite memory that you've had so far Yeah, I think that's a great question. I would say that my favorite memory of Massa. I think was like so During COVID year basically the team was working entirely virtual and I was like back at home So I couldn't meet everyone else. So last year when school came back We hosted like a barbecue party and that everyone got up got to see each other again So I think yeah, that was like a pretty nice moment just like having the opportunity to see the new members again. That's awesome. I Think for me maybe going to Southern California and testing because it's pretty cool seeing all of your work Kind of like finally result in something especially when you're with people from your team. It's pretty cool Yeah, I think my favorite part of the team is One just having cool projects to work on that aren't really related to school necessarily like there's a lot of stuff to get involved with Before it would be covered in a class But I think the most Cool part of the team is just the people that are on it. It's really a great Community of people that are all interested in one thing And working towards a joint goal. That's awesome. I really appreciate that Well, I think then I don't see any questions in the chat here But I really appreciate you guys answering those questions. I want to join messa now personally It's really exciting here about the And the software team that you're the new software team, especially for CS people And like I mentioned, this will be posted on YouTube for people to watch later And then I don't know if you guys want to mention maybe your email or something Maybe people can reach out to I don't know if you know if Just so it would be like in the recording for people to reach out to yeah, I'm getting the email right now Type it into chat Any questions, but your Instagram is also linked here, so I'm sure they can Yeah, so if you're also interested in joining the team, you can just send an email And then we figure out how to get it. It's also on our website as well Our website will have all the contact information as well as all the leads So if you're interested in a specific team, you can contact one of them directly Perfect. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you everyone for joining us as well I really appreciate it. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you


This is another example another video of examples of percent problems in this example We have I have a little bit of a different problem here to get into that problem at Clayton High School 434 students or 35 percent of the students play a sport. How many students does Clayton High School have? Okay, so in this in this picture Excuse me in this problem. What we want to do is just like last time I want to identify any numbers that I might use so as I read through this I see 434 students and I see 35 percent those are two numbers that I recognize right away I will probably use those we'll see where they go. All right now Just like last time that says this is a percent type of problem. I'm going to use my handy little Again formulas what I'll call for now percent over a hundred is equal to parts over all Okay, so again this proportion helps us to solve percent problems This is one of the one of the easier ways to help us solve percent problems, okay? So at Clayton High School 434 students or 35 percent of students play a sport. How many students does Clayton High School have? So as I read through this I want to identify Okay, what is the percent number? What is the part number? What is the whole number? Those are the three variables if you will there's the three unknowns that I have and As I read through this I'm going to figure out what those unknowns are and plug them in So one thing that I see right away one thing I can figure out is right here 35 percent I know exactly where that's going to go that's going to go in my percent spot right here So 35 over 100 that starts out my little formula here Now I got to figure out what the part is and what the hole is do I know the part? Do I know the hole? So in this case when we're talking about a school We're talking about parts of the students or we're talking about the whole student body Okay, so as I reread this This this number that comes up is just just part of the student body or is this the whole student body? Is there's the question do you want to answer? at Clayton High School 434 students or 35 percent of students play a sport at Clayton High School 434 students play a sport notice. I skipped what was in the parentheses there 434 students play a sport now that to me that tells me that's only part of the student body That's not everything. That's only part of the students So as I look at my little formula that 434 is going to go in the part spot 434 and right here might is my whole student body. How many students does Clayton High School have? That's what we're trying to answer. What's the whole student body? All right, so I need a variable for this since I'm using Clayton since it's a high school. We use H I mean you use whatever variable you want. You can use X. You can use a he's whatever you want to I'm just gonna use H for high school doesn't really matter what we use as long as we understand what the variable means Okay, so now as before this is a this is a Proportion type of problem. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use cross product to solve this cross product cross multiply Whatever you want to call it. So in this case 35 times H is 35 H equals 100 times 434 that's actually pretty easy to use so I'm going to write that out as 434 2 extra zeros on the end 434 times 100 is 43,400 And just a little bit simple math there. All right, then next What I'm going to do is I'm going to divide by 34. Nope, not 34 35. Excuse me divide by 35 So H in this case is equal to that I cannot do in my head So I'm going to use my handy-dandy off the screen here to figure out that that is going to be 1240 Okay, now once you get down to this part now remember for my last video H equals 1240 1240 that that makes no sense Nobody is going to know what that means make sure when you have a problem like this make sure you actually answer the question So what I'm going to do is take that Interpret that answer and write down Or excuse me interpret what this variable means and write down actually what my answer is so in this case H is equal to 1240 I chose H to be the whole student body How many students does Clayton high school have? H tells me the whole school. It tells me every student that's in that school Okay, so what my answer would be that Clayton high school Clayton high school Has 1240 total students And being very being very precise there. I'm saying Clayton high school That's the school I'm talking about has 1240 total students I use that extra total word there to make sure that whoever's reading this knows exactly what that means That's the total number of students that go to that high school 1240 that seems like to be a pretty big high school Anyway, that is another example of percent problems I will think I will do one more in another video to help us out with these type of percent problems


Christians and demon possession part three. What difference does it make if Christians can or cannot be possessed? All that matters is that they get free, right? Some may call it deliverance from a stronghold, another may call it exorcism of a demon. Does it really matter what terms we use? Yes, it matters because truth matters. You don't treat a broken leg as if it's a cold or cancer as if it's paralysis. If you don't properly understand the problem, you can't solve it. This explains why some Christians have to repeat cycles and never really get free. God didn't call us to go from deliverance but from glory to glory. Deliverance for the believer comes from knowing and living the truth, not from anything that resembles an exorcism. One of the devil's greatest lies is that Christians can be possessed. If he can get you to believe that lie, then he can keep you seeking deliverance when you need discipline. He can get you to blame demons instead of dealing with your flesh. If you don't address the actual problem, you'll live the rest of your life in defeat and confusion. Follow for part four.