Another Dimenxian: Tabula Digita On The New Action Arithmetic Wave - Jason Dobson

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word 'Quake'? Whatever it is, chances are that what pops into your head isn't algebra. However, the team at New York start-up Tabula Digita has set out to change that with their current project, Dimenxian.

An attempt to mesh the worlds of action video gaming and arithmetic, Dimenxian is one of the most graphically advanced and distinctly alternative non-traditional teaching paradigms yet introduced, especially as increased scrutiny over low test scores within public schools, especially within the United States, seems to warrant a radical change in how teachers deliver information to today's youth. The project is being co-developed at Oasis developer Mind Control Software, and is designed for the PC using the Torque engine. The game “will offer a relevant and engaging way for middle and high school students to learn algebra concepts”, and is scheduled for release later this year.

Recently, Serious Games Source had the opportunity to speak with Nt Etuk, CEO and Co-founder of Tabula Digita, to see just how this software was created, and how he and his team feel it will change the face of education.

Tabula Digita's Dimenxian

Hello Nt. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. Before we dive into Dimenxian, could you talk a bit about Tabula Digita itself. Where does the business trace its roots?

As for the roots of Tabula Digita, We like to say that instead of a garage in Palo Alto, Tabula was born in two apartments in the West Village of New York City. It’s an extraordinary story of two completely dissimilar guys coming together to pursue a common vision. I’m from Nigeria and the Bahamas. I knew 6 programming languages and was building basic video games on the Apple IIe when I was 11 years old in Nigeria. I came to boarding school in the States, determined to start the next Apple Computer – studied electrical engineering at Cornell University and then decided to branch into the business world. I worked developing disruptive consumer innovations with companies like Bank One, Citigroup, and McKinsey -- at Citigroup working with an R&D group that had been set up to come up with, evaluate, and roll out $100 million profit opportunities.

The Tabula story, however, for me started post Columbia Business School when I came out with a commitment for funding from the business school to launch the predecessor to Tabula. It was at that point that I met up with Robert, who had spent his life building the best multimedia applications for teaching, first for kinesthetic learners such as sports athletes and later for students, including the 1994 hit, Ozzie’s World. He had done philosophy at the University of Akron in Ohio and had started a number of businesses. When we met, he had just finished teaching mathematics in the New York City public school system and knew the very real pain the kids were in, trying to learn something as non-intuitive as math.

We were completely different! But we shared a strong passion for education and a family background in it. Both Robert’s parents were college professors. My uncle on my mother’s side is the current Minister of Education in the Bahamas, not to mention that on my father’s side, my grandfather attended Columbia Teacher’s College from Nigeria in the 30’s (and my aunt the same in the 70s – I believe) before taking his knowledge back to better the situation there.

In any case, post b-school, I was subletting an apartment from a friend of mine who was going to California for a year and he told me to check out the guy who lived, literally, next door – that he was also an entrepreneur. Rob was that guy.

Rob actually took the first step. The next day he came by and knocked on the door. We went to lunch and I started describing the idea I had been funded for by the business school. It was an educational publishing business that had a cool trading card game built into it that I was looking to put into a software format. He asked me if I wanted to see the idea represented in software. I was stunned! What he showed me was the product, Ozzie’s World, that he had worked on back in 1994. I got extremely excited. I knew the capabilities of technology at the time, and in my mind, this guy was way ahead of his time. We immediately sat down and started discussing how we could convert my funding opportunities into a business. The next day we divided the company and started writing the business plan for Tabula Digita.

As to the company's vision, our mission was and remains pretty simple. We consider ourselves to be leading what we term the “Consumer orientation charge in education”. We knew that the person who truly benefits or doesn’t from any failures in the education system is the student. They feel the pain or pleasure most – they’re the ones who either make it to and through college or, worst case, get caught in the prison system or dead. While most educational solutions seem to be focused on helping the teacher or the administrator to do their job better, we firmly believed that if we could grab the student and get them to care about education – make it relevant to them – then we could have a tremendous impact on the knowledge level and options that today’s kids have.

Where do you see Tabula Digita today and in the near future as a game development company?

Since that time 3 ½ years ago, we’ve come a long way. We’ve managed to forge some significant relationships with people in some of the leading organizations investigating this space including the MIT Media Lab, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ohio University. We’ve also secured a strategic relationship with The Princeton Review, and received our Series A venture funding this past December from Ascend Venture Group in New York City – one of the leading early stage investors with experience in education and technology. There’s still a long way to go, but we feel we’re moving in the right direction.

Looking forward – the sky’s the limit – virtual immersive learning is where the world is going to go. We’re already seeing the power of virtual worlds in games like World of Warcraft and others. And people are learning in these environments! They learn how to fish, how to hunt, they learn motor skills, they learn the histories of ancient empires (not all in that game, of course)! They can certainly learn more pertinent things for success in today’s society, and we at Tabula Digita intend to be one of those leading the charge down this path.

I'll start with a question that was posed by University of Wisconsin-Madison educators and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory in a white paper linked to on the Tabula Digita website. Will video games change the way we learn?

Absolutely – in fact, they already are to a point. I mentioned World of Warcraft previously and the learning that already occurs in such environments. As we move forward, the line between entertainment and education will continue to blur, and it will become more and more obvious that to educate a member of today’s generation you first have to engage them, then you can teach them whatever you want them to know. In the past it has been generally accepted that there were three legs to the learning stool – instruction, practice, application. With the rise of a new method of teaching (educational gaming) and the rise of the MTV generation, we, at Tabula Digita, add engagement as a new and critical leg of that stool.

We believe educational gaming can, at the very least, be an effective complement to the instruction aspect of teaching. Throwing a person into a virtual learning environment can be incredibly engaging, offer a great deal of practice, and demonstrate different applications of knowledge. Over time, we believe it can be extremely impactful on the instructional element also.

There’s also one more element of video game learning that is often overlooked by people. It’s what I call the emotional learning element. It seems to be well accepted by self-help gurus like Tony Robbins that the way you learn to change something about yourself is to attach emotion to a thought or an action. For example, if you want to lose weight, attach a negative emotion to eating the next bite, and a positive emotion to exercising. But have you ever noticed that we don’t associate any emotions with learning in the classroom? It’s odd. The closest you get too emotion comes after the fact – how did I do on that test or exam? Well, with video games, you can give an immediate feedback loop that positively reinforces getting the right answer immediately, or that can offer some pain or disappointment for the wrong answer at once. That’s powerful! And that’s one of the main reasons why I know that this type of learning will take off.

Regarding Dimenxian, this certainly is a juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated areas – math and action gaming. How did the team arrived at this unique game design idea? Was it one person's stroke of genius, or a collaborative idea?

It was Rob and my genius, of course. *laugh* No, but seriously, as a business proposition we chose math because we wanted to start with what we knew to be a tremendous pain point. Do you know that up to 83% of U.S. high school kids are not proficient in math at their grade level? That 35% of them are failing? You’ve probably seen the international comparison trends in math and science that illustrate the fact that the US is falling further and further behind other nations. Combine that with teacher shortages you have in these critical areas in places like New York City, and you have a real national crisis! A crisis that more and more people are going to pay attention to – and you’re starting to see this. The government has now started paying particular attention to high school education, especially in math and science, and even Bill Gates has decried the effectiveness of high school education in math and science in the U.S. These are powerful forces that have the ability to focus a lot of attention on this area of concern.

As far as action gaming goes – it sort of intuitively made a lot of sense to us as a genre that provides the ability for continuous engagement. However, we also knew that action adventure is a genre that has one of the higher appeals of any genre to both genders, and that was important to us.

Staying with this for a second, so you feel that there is some pressure from forces outside the classroom for projects such as this, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance?

Yes. NCLB is providing challenges in the classroom due to accountability of the teacher/school to prepare the student to pass the test. One key motivator is definitely providing a proven tool that will allow students to learn in environment that are engaging, non-threatening and are relevant to their learning style. However, our product has relevance to preparing students regardless of NCLB.

One doesn't usually correlate math with fun, which is sort of the point of your project. How does Dimenxian bridge this gap?

Well – the market has told us great video games are fun. The market has also told us that kids don’t necessarily equate fun with easy – try solving some of the logic puzzles in today’s modern video games, and you’ll see they aren’t simple at all, but kids still consider them fun. Frankly, our challenge is to substitute those logic puzzles with math or other educational problems without losing the great gameplay element. Of course, that’s not simple – if it were, everyone would be doing it, but if you can – man! You’ve got something.

How complex does the math get in Dimenxian? Is it suited or scalable to all classroom ages and skill levels?

Our first set of products target introductory algebra to intermediate algebra, so they get as complicated as those concepts. The great thing about algebra is that it’s suitable for several ages, based upon their readiness for the content. Algebra can address advanced students as early as the 6th grade, students at the age of taking Algebra I, students in later stages of High School who have to pass state exams, and remedial classes in Freshman year of college. Sure, the programs will be scalable.

Can you walk us through what a typical game of Dimenxian is like for a newcomer who is being presented with math-related material in a new way?

Well – probably their first impression as they see the cool 3D fly through in the beginning shot of the game would be “I’m gonna learn math in here?!?” We take our stealth learning mission pretty seriously. Now remember, our games are 3D with real time rendering, so for example, in our mission to review and teach the coordinate system, we hide learning about the 2D coordinate system in a player’s efforts to locate certain places in a 3D game world they have to traverse using a 2D map in the corner of their screen as a guidance tool.

We correct critical mistakes like transposing (e.g. if the person flips the x and y axis numbers and goes to (x,y = 3,23) instead of (x,y = 23,3) that they were told to go to) by making horrible things happen to them if they go to the wrong, transposed coordinate. (Thus, in an educational video game pedagogy, you actually allow the player to fail as much as they like, because that’s what teaches them.) Along the way in the game, at opportune times where the pace has slowed or stopped (e.g. download data from a terminal, for example), we test their knowledge of the coordinate system by asking questions about where they are, what quadrant they’re in, etc.

Of course, all of this happens within the context of the game. Our goal is not to present something that makes no sense to the student, like shooting aliens by solving math problems. Today’s kids tend to see through that and demand a more involved, more integrated experience.

Why do you feel more traditional and established methods of teaching are being questioned, and projects such as yours are gaining so much attention? Is it student apathy, or something more?

Well – from an institutional perspective, I think it has always been known that the system needed to morph its instructional materials into more interactive formats. In fact, ways to do this from CDs in the back of the textbook to e-books have been looked at before. Of course, many of these efforts failed with the dot com crash, and never generated a lot of traction.

What you’re seeing now is a re-emergence of that interest, but driven from a new direction – the classroom. Under No Child Left Behind, there is now tremendous pressure for institutions such as schools to demonstrate that they can perform. In many ways, this has forced the entire educational community to explore any possibility of engaging a child’s interest and mind because they can no longer afford to leave stones unturned. This has opened the door to at least the consideration of different alternatives.

As far as traditional methods go - there are many elements of traditional teaching that are still good today as evidenced by students who are learning these concepts presently. However, they do not address the mass of students who have grown up in the TV and video game generation and are much more adept at figuring out concepts, strategies, etc. We bring the game and concept together by applying concepts in an engaging and relevant context.

As for student apathy? I’m not sure what you mean. Students still love to learn. You’ll never find a child or teenager who doesn’t learn very quickly how to work their Ipod, kick a soccer ball, or play a video game, if that’s what they want to do. Today’s student just hast to be stimulated and motivated in different ways to learn traditional content that is more relevant to how he/she lives his or her life

On the development side of things, how challenging was it to create a compelling game experience that was wrapped around the idea of educating its players as well as entertaining them?

Well, this is challenging stuff, and nobody really knows what the absolute right balance between education and entertainment is – not even us. The issue is no one has done this well before (though we think we come as close, if not closer than anyone in the past). We have great gaming folks and great education personnel, but bridging the gap takes a lot of white board space, tanks of Java, and a tremendous can-do attitude. Luckily we have built our company with a “Wild-man” mindset that doesn’t resist completely blowing up preconceived notions of how things should be done

Once Dimenxian is completed, how does Tabula Digita plan to market it to schools? This is especially directed toward the many school districts that operate on a modest budget, with aging PC hardware. The game does little to help their students if they cannot afford licensing fees, or even run the game itself.

I agree with your assessment, although I will say that 1) we have had a number of schools and school districts approach us about implementing our solution, and 2) we are building a business for the future, so we do believe that eventually schools will have the right technology and the right purchasing mindset (once we have proven the effectiveness of the format). Nonetheless, you are right that most schools today probably do not have the necessary rendering capabilities built into their machines. Nonetheless, there are a variety of outlets other than school districts that we intend to market to.

Is there concern that the player will become dependent on the game as a tool to work out math-related problems, and when posed with similar problems in the outside world without the software they will be unable (or perhaps unwilling) to make the transition?

I don’t think so. A video game world actually provides students with a great variety of scenarios to encounter any given educational concept. For example, we could create scenarios where solving for the hypotenuse of a triangle could open a door, help you to traverse a dangerous jungle, or help you determine the length of rope you need to slide down from a castle wall. So from a flexibility standpoint, students should be well prepared for circumstances that arise in the outside world.

As far as creating a dependency on the software for the solving of real-world problems – this shouldn’t happen if we do our job right. It’s not as if we are presenting a tool like a calculator that potentially substitutes for the thought process. The purpose of the scenarios we create is to stimulate a shift to a mindset for evaluating and solving problems quickly and efficiently. That shift should occur regardless of whether the scenario is in a virtual world or the real world.

Can you see this or similar products being used to help convey other learning disciplines outside of math. Science for instance? Is this an area you'd like to see Tabula Digita engaged in?

Definitely, there are more applications for this type of learning environment. We are looking at all subject categories at this time to determine where this type of engagement is most needed and the best fit.