9: Education 👩‍🎓 User Experience – Students
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Why are we talking about education this week? What started this conversation? Last time we talked about shopping and you can't buy anything if you don't have an education. It's a great connection. I love it. Maybe we're talking about it as we all went to school and we've never graduated from complaining about it.

PB bringing the depth I love it PB

Otherwise known as Lead, also known as Paul Breaker. I feel like our education system is serving someone pretty well because Rob instantly knew the periodic table of the elements entry for Lead is PB. He knew that. Yeah. That's amazing. Maybe I had a pretty good education down in Louisiana.

No, that can't be it. Maybe we should call my high school chemistry teacher.

We won't be calling your high school English teacher, that's for sure. Welcome to another episode of ID8. This is my group UX podcast. This month we're throwing the book at an industry with a real UX problem that goes back centuries. In discovery, our guests are going to describe a problem that stretches all the way from primary school through college and right into the workplace.

In definition, we're going to isolate the players and their challenges. And finally, in ideation, we're going to look for some ways over this fence. So first, we talked to Dr. James Chitwood. Dr. James Chitwood. I've worked in higher education for 20 years. And basically, he said that students are walking just blindly into college without any real plans.

I've seen over my couple decades so many students pursuing college without a really good idea of why they're going. Really, schools should be offering these kids guidance. And, you know, on high schools right now, the number of students to go

college and career advisors is just horrific. And so, so many people are being left by the wayside without any real good guidance. And without that guidance, the parents and the students, they don't understand the impact that all this debt is going to have on the life of the student. I don't think any parent

of a recent high school graduate would say to their child, oh, that's a good idea to go purchase that $80,000 car on a payment plan. I don't know very many parents who would say that. But that's essentially what we're doing. When I talk to people who are recently out of college, who are paying down their debt

They all say the exact same thing, that had they known what they know now, they would have done the path differently. But it kind of stems, in his opinion, from this message that's become very popular in recent years, that you should pursue your passion. Pleasing.

go follow your dream because you have more passion for it. Most people I talk to are who are having difficulties in life. It's not because they're not following their passion. It's because they're struggling financially. And then the worst thing in the world can happen, which is somebody's passion becomes a burden. And now they've lost this

spark of joy and hope and happiness that they had because they tried to rely upon that as an income source and it's just not there for them versus if they had chosen a career that might have paid them better and kept the passion as something they did as a hobby or an interest, then it can always hold that magic for them.

So that's part of it. What is your goal for this education? And then the other part is, how can I pursue the education in the most financially responsible way? The vast majority of institutions cap their tuition at X number of credits. So typically it's 12 credits. Some of the elites, it's eight credits. They still schedule you for 12 to 16. But what they don't tell you is that those credits above 12, so let's just use that, are technically free. So

The schools aren't having those conversations with students that say, oh, by the way, signing up full time, you're now going to do five years instead of four. To do it in four, you have to take 15 to 18 credits every semester. Oh, and by the way, you will probably save yourself $25,000 to $50,000 if you do it this way.

A lot of people will go to school and to help pay for the school, they'll think, well, I will work while I go to school so that I can help pay for it part time. I'll also sign up for all kinds of extracurricular activities so I can make the best of that education. My freshman year of college, I'm going to go get me a job so I can spend these one.

Okay, extracurricular activities may or may not be a good move depending on your financial status situation. And I can appreciate working, but doing the return on investment or return on effort, I should say, between taking one or two extra courses and making part-time wage income. You know, if they're not making $50,000 a year, it might make more sense just to buckle down and take one or two more extra courses a semester. Hmm.

if kids are not pursuing the right kind of education, shouldn't employers be offering more guidance? - Yeah, I would say so. And I would say you're seeing examples of that now with all the conversations about STEM fields.

there's a significant drive and interest in programming, um, as employers are reaching out and holding, um, workshops and bootcamps to create that type of awareness. Um, so some larger corporations like a Google, for example, have bootcamps and workshops that help kids to get interested in programming before they choose an education path. And that's great. But if you're like Joe's mechanic shop, uh,

you know, you may not have the resources to devote to grooming people through their college.

and he said that's kind of a shame too because there's no shame in pursuing trade school we were kind of taught that the children that went to the trade school weren't intelligent enough to go to college you know the the average earning a 45 year old who pursued a trade path and the average earnings of an individual who chose the university path the difference literally is a thousand dollars

which is kind of amazing, right? That's not the perception. There's a total branding problem with the trade school path. He says that in Europe, it's not that way. You have standard education through your middle school years, but then by the end of middle school, they're watching your aptitudes. - And then they pursue a high school that's either a vocational school or a university track school.

And the vocational school is an extra two years. Yet when they graduate, they graduate with a skill and a trade and can go get a very good paying job and have a great career the rest of their life. But basically he just said like currently the way that the education system is set up, you need to be educated about education before you can get educated.

And that's a shame. There's something interesting about the idea that people are engaging in something that they know very little about just because society has pushed them to that place, especially in considering to the idea there about trade versus university and how if you go to a university, you're spending much more money. And if the difference in amount earned is $1,000 a year,

That's not a very good business move. If you think about your job career as a business, then, you know, that's not very smart. It just reminded me, I made a website for an association of landscapers like 10 years ago. The website is still live. I can't believe it. Thelandlovers.org. It was brilliant.

made for students to look into a career in landscaping. Like there's all these different careers that they can pursue that pay well and that are understaffed. And so associations sometimes get together. They say, like, we can't do anything on a scale by ourselves, but they get together and they say, okay, let's try to reach out to students and

and say, "Hey, don't forget about us." Maybe that's like a job fair or education fairs. They go in there and say, "Hey, maybe you shouldn't become a psych major. You should become a landscape

architect. Yeah. It's funny. There are a lot of successful people who have these careers where they have just an education from life in general. Like my brother, you know, he was a landscape architect for like 40 years and he made a pretty decent living and he led a happy life and he didn't have a degree. Yeah. I think there's a perception that university will equate to a high paying job

I found this report from CNBC that says that graduates of the class of 2018 are heading into a job market with the lowest unemployment in 17 years and higher starting salaries. However, employers plan to hire fewer new grads than in recent years. And then it goes on and says that as a result, nearly four in 10 recent graduates do not think it's likely they'll be able to pay off their student loan debt within 10 years.

So when you start to think about the amount of people that are coming out of college and the amount of people that have debt from that, it's $1.5 trillion of debt that people in the U.S. have from school loans. And some 40% may default on their loans by 2023. It's a pretty big problem. It's bigger than the real estate mortgage crisis of 2007 and 2008. There's a bubble that's about to be popped.

A troubling report out this week regarding Americans struggling to pay back student loans. More than 40% of borrowers aren't making payments, raising fears they may never be paying more than $200 million. All right, let's talk about Ed. Yeah, so Ed Sanderson. I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Dusaris.

A company that helps families navigate the challenges associated with admissions, career planning, financial aid. He helps us to appreciate how big of a financial commitment college is. The country as a whole has $1.5 trillion in student loan debt.

And it's uncollateralized debt, which most people are familiar with. But this debt is very hard to get rid of. Bankruptcy does nothing towards it. A lot of times the interest rates are so high that the amount of debt increases, even though you're making your minimum payments. So news around people's neck, they'll never be able to afford retirement.

because they're going to be paying on this debt indefinitely. Yeah, we got a big problem on our hands. Even though a lot of people feel that college education is good, the decisions that people make on what they go to college for and what they decide to do with that education is important. It matters. You know, you might have a situation where a student wants to be an educator. They want to become a teacher. Well, in the course of doing that, they've spent $150,000, $170,000 in education.

an education investment, but that career is only going to pay them $45,000 a year. And no one seems to be teaching kids the impact of their decisions. I've said this before. It's like giving the kids the keys to Mercedes Benz every single year, letting them crash it into a wall and

and then give him the keys to a new Mercedes-Benz the next year. It's like a huge waste of money. And so he's like, you obviously wouldn't do that. So why would you just go to college without knowing what you want to go to college for? When you talk to employers, the first thing they will tell you is that the skill set that they need to have successful companies is not being taught in college, right? So they want people to be able to come out

problem solve, work together. They want collaboration and they want skill sets that advance the profitability of an institution. Yeah, I mean, listen to this clip from President Trump. Well, oftentimes business education today, and I see it all the time, kids come out of college, the best colleges, Wharton and Harvard and Stanford and some of the great business schools. And

they'll come out and they won't have practical experience. Yeah. And so Ed encourages the idea of exploring what career you want to engage in before actually making the decision, starting down the path of a major that you're not specifically interested in or really want to commit to for the rest of your life. No disrespect, but

I'm not interested in paying $200,000 for a social experiment for them to find out how they feel about something because we're talking about real dollars and real sense. And at the end of the day, we want to make the best investment that we possibly can. So here's a few statistics from Consumer Reports. It says that 45% of people with student loan debt said that college was not worth the cost.

And then of those, of that 45%, 38% didn't graduate, 69% have had trouble making loan payments, 78% earn less than $50,000 a year, and 43% didn't get help from parents making financial aid decisions. Financial literacy, nobody's telling them what the impact of $150,000 in student loans going to have on them. There's a hole there, which is...

is, hey, can we help you figure out a way to monetize this degree

so that if we're making investment upfront, we have an ROI that justifies that move. - It's so amazing to me that it's so common to not know what you're going to school for. You think that people would do more research ahead of time. College is valuable for certain things. A doctor needs in-depth education. A lawyer needs in-depth education. But the fact that colleges have become this adulthood incubator,

Right. Yeah. That's great. It is a poor use of funds that when majority of jobs out there, they don't require the level of education that they couldn't get on the job or through skill training. It's just a facade. They say, come here to get an education when everyone says, no, it's just where I became an adult. Yeah. Yeah. That's where I explored myself. For $80,000. So I went to a technical high school and-

You don't pick a major right away for your first year. They have different trades and they call each trade a shop. Electronics, electrical, auto maintenance, graphics, culinary arts, drafting, plumbing, and carpentry.

And all of the freshmen for their entire first year spent a few weeks in each trade. And by the time you get to your sophomore year, it's expected that you're going to choose a trade to go into. It's like you have an entire year to explore everything. And for me, you know, not having any kind of muscular structure to speak of, I chose electronics. Yeah.

And here we are today. But the thing is, I'm still in an industry that's loosely related to what I started. I went to college for communications, like video production and radio production, and that didn't really get me anywhere. You are on a podcast right now. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair point. You made it. Yeah.

No, I think I appreciated that about Ed. He wasn't saying that college is useless or it's not valuable. He was simply trying to encourage this exploratory phase beforehand. You know, it's not like kids are going to college with not having access

had any education. You have kids going through 12 or 13 years of school with not much to show for it, except for like some basic knowledge of how to read and write and do some arithmetic. Why is public schooling failing these children so much?

That's a nice segue into our next interview. Hello, my name is Ivan Chang and I'm currently a professor at California State University, Northridge. And Ivan travels all over the country trying to change the way public schools educate students. Teaching sometimes gets in the way of learning. And I find that to be disturbing, to say the least.

We alienate many, many students, capable students, brilliant students, and they are turned off by our schools. They don't buy in to the system that we're trying to provide for them. And they drop out. And once kids drop out, that leads to a whole host of societal issues. So he says education is an economic problem.

The fact that schools are failing means that we're all failing on some degree. He said, well, there is a UX problem with education. This gets to the user experience, if you will. If teachers are teaching only to reach the 10%, the kids who are aligned with the teacher's style and personality, then that's

There's something wrong with what we're doing. But no one thinks about changing it because it's an unwritten script. I'm going to pause for a moment and just talk about unwritten scripts. There are different kinds of restaurants, right? We go into a fast food restaurant. We look up because there's a menu up there. And then we go up to the counter and we tell the cashier what we want. We pay them and then they either give us a number or they hand us the food right away.

We go into an upscale restaurant, we do not look up for a menu. We expect a nicely dressed person to greet us and to take our names and perhaps make us wait and then at some point escort us to a table at which point another nicely dressed person will come and ask us for our preferences of drinks and food and then they bring it out to you.

That's a very different script. And the behavior that we exhibit in each environment is unwritten. And he says that the unwritten script of education, where there's like this one person behind a podium, just like talking forever, and all the kids are in rows behind these desks, that's been unchanged forever.

for centuries. Our current system is modeled after the factories. They have bells and then they have times and there's a break time and then there's a lunch time and then there's the quitting time and you clock in and you clock out. You know, it's based around grooming children to work in factories. We're teaching them how to regurgitate information and spit it back out on some test. If you're going to go work in a factory, that's the skill you need, right? You need to just do what you're told. That

is not sufficient for 2018 because we now need people who can think, who can reason, who can make decisions. And that is not what we're teaching our kids to do. We begin by giving kids a ton of symbols, equations, formulas, definitions. They have no idea what those things really, really mean. A variable is a letter that can be used in an equation.

Okay. And why would you use it? That gets at the UI and the UX, right? You're thinking about the user, the learner, and what it takes for them to learn something, whatever that something is. It all gets filtered through our current experiences. He thinks that educators need to craft activities that empower kids to think and solve problems and learn really on their own. You know, my daughter came home one day when she was in third grade, I think.

And I said, "What are you guys learning today in school?" And she said, "Oh yeah, we learned about fractions." And I said, "Great. So what did you learn about fractions?" And she said, "Fractions are when you have two numbers with a subtraction sign between them."

So she was thinking of fractions purely in terms of the symbols and not in terms of what it really means. Ironically, that very morning, there were three granola bars on the table and I have four kids and they were asking me how they were going to be able to divide it up fairly among the four of them. So ultimately, they came up with this idea of what if we cut each bar into four pieces? Then they'll take one from each bar. So they've just done three fourths. That's a fraction.

They didn't realize it. This was a real experience that they were able to work through the mathematics without being taught any rules or even using any particular symbols. If you have ever experienced bowling, I'm a pretty lousy bowler, so my balls end up going down the gutter.

You know, it's fun. You laugh about it. But after a few times, it's not fun anymore because, like, why do I keep playing? Right. And that's the experience that our kids have when they're trying to do math. Right. They're throwing gutter balls. So as you're training them how to do this, you put the bumper guards up.

so that when they throw the ball, there are times when it'll hit the bumper guard, but at least it'll stay in and hit some pins. And that's how you get to perfect your bowling and still get some sense of accomplishment. Teaching math can be the same way. So what I do is I help teachers develop bumper guards for their lessons.

We call that guided discovery. - So he uses a lot of like physical objects in his teaching or teaching kids, you know, how to understand mathematic principles by use of real world examples. - It's like, it's like you're throwing them into the deep end of the pool, but with a safety harness so they won't drown. - Yeah, exactly. - And they can just swim around and figure it out.

Figure it out, y'all. One of the most interesting things I got from that was this intuitive to 10%. I started thinking about that. How many students finish school at like a high rate of success?

It's probably 10%, you know, like there's a TED talk by Salman Khan Khan Academy. But he said it's probably a matter of timing and like way of teaching that we're all here today. He's talking to an audience like it's like when you start to think about the idea that you only were successful because the circumstances were right for you and not necessarily everyone else that you went to school with.

That's kind of a sobering thought, you know? Kaaaaaan! The wrath of Kaaan. That word intuitive, people throw it around a lot. I was recently reminded that when someone says that's intuitive, they really mean that's what I'm used to or what I would expect. And that's a dangerous mindset to be in as user experience designers is to assume that how we perceive things is how others will.

or how they'll use them. And that's with education. It's so prescriptive and said, this is the way that we teach. And it's intuitive to 10%. If you build an interface that's made for someone else's mindset, you're not going to be able to figure it out, or it will take you longer to figure it out. And you've wasted a lot of time. A while ago, Paul Simon had a song called Kodachrome, where he said, if I think about all the stuff that I learned in high school, it's a wonder that I could think at all.

And that is obviously what keeps me up at night. How do we change the way we do things so that we can have a more productive and just society? When I feel crap, I learned in high school. It's a wonder I can't think at all. Education hadn't hurt me. I can read the writing on my...

So that makes me think of our other interview with Dr. Steve Monroe. Yeah, Steve Monroe. I am the regional training director for air gas. They sell and distribute gases that are used for welding or medical uses. And Dr. Monroe is responsible for training over 500 people.

Talking to Dr. Munro made me think of not just the institutions that are responsible for teaching us, but made me think about how our brains decide to accept and to retain information. I mean, how do you guys think if you're a salesperson and you're going to be selling nuts and bolts and welding supplies, how do you think that training is held?

I mean, I would, I don't know. I mean, I would expect to get to touch and feel and see what those things are. Maybe have a comparison to competitors' products to see how they differ and what areas are valuable to show to a person potentially would buy that. I was in the Navy for 10 years in the 80s, right? And I can remember sitting in training and you have the trainer standing up and delivering, right? Stand and deliver.

they don't move from behind the podium they read the screens full of words you know a lot not a lot of questions it was just a whole lot of telling so he had come to realize that our willingness to sit and take in facts like that has has changed i truly believe stand and deliver is dead we cannot use that methodology anymore because we lose our audience so because of our phones social media modern television we all have a short attention

Hold on a second. Sorry, a bird flew by my window. Students are having a hard time concentrating, easily distracted. What's that? A bird? So we need to be stimulated now to learn.

Visually, physically, and even emotionally. And Dr. Monroe found that part of this method had to be talking less. They need to take ownership of what they're going to learn today, which requires me to stop talking and let them talk. Let them self-discover what it is that's being taught today.

Not only do you have to own it, but you also have to see its practical value. Because they need to think that they own the material so that when they go back to the workplace, they can use it. And what that requires is the trainer to stop training and start facilitating. So that's not really new. Part of the reason I'm terrible at math is because I decided...

that it wasn't going to be worth my mental energy in school. I'm never going to use the surface area of a triangle. I'm not listening. For example, we have branches that sell welding supplies, right?

So you have the individual in the welding class. They've never welded a day in their life. They've read the books, they've seen the videos, but their brains haven't really cataloged it much more than just an ancillary piece of information. Now you take them down into the lab and then they go to strike their first arc. The fire, the explosion, the in-your-face

Oh, we're gonna die feeling. And so your brain is like, what did I just see? Right? So what's happening in the brain, right? Is the brain is going, okay, all right. We're gonna need a catalog. This one needs its own neuron. All right. But of course, not everything is going to be as exciting as welding torches and explosions in your face.

but our brains do have to be stimulated to take it in. We have to see the value of it. But even if we do, Dr. Monroe said something really interesting. Here's the truth. They're going to walk away with 10%, period. No matter what you say, no matter how much fun you make it, no matter how much facilitation you do, six months from now, they will still only maybe own 10%.

Wait, wait. He said 10% of the stand and deliver method or of any method? Any method. He said no matter what you're doing, they're going to forget most of it. Oh, come on. You don't believe that? No, not at all. Why? How is that true? Like, there's no way that that's true. How much do you remember of that TED talk that you just brought up?

I don't even remember who gave it. Yeah, there is a sliding scale. The truth is that you are going to forget a large amount of information, even if you are glued to it and you are enthralled by the presentation, by the experience, our brains just forget. And if we're going to be talking about memory, you know what that means.

It's hippocampus time. So when we go through an experience, there are different parts of our brain that's lighting up. And that includes external things like vision, sound, smell, our senses, and then internal things like emotions. And our hippocampus decodes all that information and stores it. But there are all these things working against memory. There are a few theories of why that happens. Displacement, interference, and decay.

So displacement is saying like our brain is like RAM on your computer. It has a maximum capacity. It fills up. And then as new things come in, the older things or what it deems less important is pushed out.

So you're trying to remember a number and then someone tells you another number and it pushes it out of there. Even if you really want to remember that number. That's the displacement theory. The interference theory is saying that it's coding all this different information and putting it into a sequence. The room smelled like sawdust. You were feeling relaxed. An air conditioner was humming in the background. You're shown a welding technique.

Let's say five years from now you smell sawdust and your heart rate is at 119 beats per minute. Then your brain matches those two things together and says, "Hey, that reminds me of the time I learned that welding technique."

This process that helps us to remember might also be the same reason we forget some things. As you go about your day, your brain is making all of these coded patterns of the things that it's perceiving and is looking for things to forget. So it says this pattern, that sounds a lot like that pattern. I'm going to delete them both. So that's one aspect of the interference theory. Interference

Interference could also prevent us from learning something by saying, "Hey, I already know how to do something like this. I don't need this new information." Or it might say, "Hey, this reminds me of something I already know. Let's delete that thing." Even if you want to hold on to it and remember both things. The last theory of why we forget is one that we could easily wrap our heads around, and that's the decay theory. Quite simply, over time we forget. If we don't constantly reinforce something that we learn, we will lose it over time.

So how can we make sure that the information that we're being educated about is deemed by our brain as important? How can we make it unique enough to avoid interference and displacement and make sure it's retained over time without decaying? Aaron, out. So these are all, these are three...

theories about why we forget stuff. Yeah. And what you're saying is they're not mutually exclusive. It's not that one is true or the other. They're all true. Maybe. We have to fight all three. Exactly. Okay. Cool. So let's ideate. Commencing ideation. Buckle your seatbelts.

I don't know, Rob, do you want to start? Yeah, I think we're too focused on memorizing and reading about things instead of doing things.

Students learn in a variety of different ways. Some of the teachers are not very good at the standard way of teaching students, this lecture-based classroom thing. So I think teachers need to be given more tools to teach in different ways. And we're at a point in technology where that's possible. Khan Academy provide video tutorials on how to do a variety of different things.

And what's interesting about their approach is that they flipped the classroom from being a lecture-based teacher setting, and they let each student go through their video tutorials on their own, individually.

And then the teacher can go around the room and tutor individual students as they see them failing in this dashboard. It's like I'm going to imagine Khan Academy is doing a great job at that already, right? But what if you want to teach something like a custom curriculum?

What if you want to teach electrical engineering or you want to teach crocheting or you want to teach scuba diving, whatever it is. There's a certain amount of in-class activity that needs to happen. So it's almost like we need to templatize learning

we could allow teachers to create custom lessons, share, modify those lessons, and capitalize on their strengths, right? Yeah, I think so. And I think the templatization of that is a thing that could be used not only in grade school, but also in universities and in continued education in businesses.

Awesome. Okay. Well, let me riff off that for just a second then, because I like where you're going with that. When I was listening to these interviews, I thought there were a handful of problems that kept bubbling up across the board. One was that students and parents don't know what tracks to pursue to get to their goal. And what's their goal? It's to get a good job, right?

The high schools are underfunded to provide the guidance. The colleges just want to sell programs and the employers are not getting qualified graduates into their workforce. So I feel like the employers need to get involved sooner. And we talked about how that's not possible maybe for Joe's tire shop or Dick's bookstore or whatever. But...

That said, could we take Aaron's suggestion of the landscape association and create industries within a platform where the employers register? They might be monetarily involved to have a say in the future of their workforce. They associate their business with an industry and then communicate what they want their future workforce to learn. In fact, they might be the ones to create some of these custom curriculums.

And then the high schools could get a kickback from the fees that we're imposing on the associations and the employers, maybe even the colleges at that point. We'll get a clear sense of like where their aptitudes lie and we can guide them through a college or trade school path that will lead them into a career that they'll be qualified to contribute to down the road. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. All right. Aaron, what do you got? Yeah. So obviously I was thinking a lot about memory. So how do you get the students to retain the information that they need to hold on to, to be successful? And when you were talking about having the industry set a curriculum or setting goals, that really stood out to me, you know, thinking of teachers more as implementers and facilitators for those goals.

So my solution is really more student focused in that it's a learning calendar. Now there's already self-guided learning out there, but my proposal for this problem of retention is to not have a textbook, but to have a self-determined calendar.

So because our brains forget over time that things decay, the student would take all those things that the industry wants them to learn. They say, you have to learn these things over this period of time. And then they're given options. Maybe they can do video. Maybe they can do on the job training. Maybe they can read a textbook. Maybe they can listen to a lecture. So they choose that and they say, I'm going to do that on June 1st. And then on August 1st, I'm going to reinforce that either by taking a test.

which is the least interesting way. Or how about teaching a new student what they learned on June 1st? So not only are they reinforcing it by talking about it again, they're doing it at a much later time. So they're building these pathways and solidifying these memories of facts and core concepts.

We can be talking about high school students, middle school students. We could be talking about adults that are on a career path and they can take this calendar and make sure that they're learning new things and retaining what they learned. Oh, now I get it. Is it basically like a curriculum approach to that flashcard? Graduated interval recall. The Leitner method. Yeah, Leitner method, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of, too. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, like the Duolingo app, which is like a language teaching app, basically keeps track of when you learned something, and then it makes you revisit that after a certain period of time.

Absolutely. Imagine if that tool was used from kindergarten through university, maybe into the workplace, right? Like, I mean, you're talking about a real like holistic approach here, but you could trace back their understanding of something to its core and make sure that they have gotten the proper tree of knowledge for that thing that you want them to do. That's exactly it.

The second I graduated from high school, I freed myself to admit that summer break is the worst invention of all time. I loved it. I loved it as a student, but it is the worst thing for education. You forget everything. And for parents and for society as a whole, all these kids unleashed on the poor community. But...

The first three months of your next grade was, okay, now let's teach you algebra all over again because you forgot. Yeah. Well, I mean, the fact of the matter too is that if this was like a thing that you got to take with you all the time, like this interactive textbook application, whatever that would be like, right? Maybe if it was engaging enough and interesting enough, you could keep the summer break, but now kids are exploring on their own. Yeah. Let them be away from school for large swaths of time if you want.

but you could still hold them accountable to keep that knowledge fresh in their mind remotely, right? - Yeah. - So let me see if we got this straight. What we wanna make is this custom curriculum builder with templates for different learning and teaching styles. And it's flexible enough to really be used anywhere, but primarily in public schools, vocational schools, or even continuing education. And it's built on a platform that supports input from representatives of industry

who might want future employees to have certain skills and qualities, right? There's a monetization structure to facilitate early guidance for students on college that takes their aptitudes into consideration and a retention calendar based on graduated interval recall that ensures that what they learn, the principles they learn, stick around as they enter the workforce. Did I get that about right? I give it a A.

A plus plus. We'll just put it over. Would ideate again. Yeah. All right, then let's build this thing. So many thanks to our guests today. Dr. James Chitwood, Ed Sanderson, Ivan Chang and Dr. Steve Monroe. So many thanks to our guests.

So many fantastic insights there. And of course, we're always very interested in your insights as well. So if you have any thoughts on this topic, please hit us up on Twitter or on our blog where we get thousands of meaningful comments. Now for a new segment of our show we like to call Bot I Love You. Where we read some of our real listeners' comments submitted to our WordPress blog. Ugrad writes...

I think you're right, Ugrad. Thanks for writing in. Yespas Rep says,

Whereas the for the most part, evaluative waiting and executing a process is called turnaround time. Thanks for the tip, YesPassHep. Perhaps our next podcast will be on the nature of time. MochaGilm says...

Always be familiar to you people. Carry business cards with you and give them at the opportunity. Kroc was convinced that the company needs a strong president who shares his faith in McDonald's and at least as much as he himself adhering to his criteria of quality, service, purity, and value. Spyware for Nokia? Does the radar detector respond to the camera GPS navigator card? Five strips, what's the difference?

Mocha Glimp, we already did an in-depth series on shopping. Please check it out. Well, that's all the time we've got for Bot I Love You. We had over 3,000 comments to sort through, so please forgive us if we didn't get to yours. And don't let that stop you. Please reach out to us at ideate.team, and we'll be in touch real soon.