From Players to Creators: How Student Game-Making Builds AI-Era Skills | Matt Dalio

Play isn’t just fun—it’s a blueprint for learning. In this episode, Dr. Lisa Hassler and Matt Dalio (Endless Studios/Foundation) explore how student game-making builds creativity, collaboration, and resilience while scaffolding real tools—from no-code building to Unity and Blender.

We unpack the research on learning by making, connect Jane McGonigal’s mechanics of motivation to classroom practice, and trace a big-picture story from the printing press to software literacy. 

Matt lays out why the next divide is not just devices and bandwidth, but the ability to create with digital tools and command AI workflows. You’ll hear how  teachers can launch projects in minutes, not months. Along the way, we challenge the input-obsessed mindset of school and advocate for outcome-focused learning: build something that works, share it, improve it.

Highlights:

• Research showing gains from student-created games
• Endstar’s classroom-friendly on-ramp to pro tools: from no-code to Unity
• Multidisciplinary learning: CS, art, writing, math, project mgmt
• Equity: offline-first kits + affordable devices
• AI, software literacy, and outcome-based learning
• Play as a driver of learning, resilience, and creativity
• Classroom rollout, peer learning, and ready-to-use curricula
• Closing the digital divide with devices and offline content
• Becoming power users of AI and building real-world outputs

Matt Dalio- m@endlessstudios.com

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Sponsored by Dr. Gregg Hassler Jr., DMD
Trusted dental care for healthy smiles and stronger communities—building brighter futures daily.

Chapters

• 0:38 Why Play Matters For Learning
• 1:39 Forms Of Play And Research Evidence
• 3:14 Jane McGonigal’s Framework For Motivation
• 4:39 Introducing Guest Matt Dalio
• 6:27 AI, Literacy, And Future Of Work
• 9:05 From Printing Press To Software Literacy
• 12:20 Teachers, Skills Gaps, And Engagement
• 15:00 Games As The On-Ramp To Coding
• 17:34 Turning Education Into A Network Effect
• 21:03 Bridging Minecraft And Unity With NSTAR
• 24:49 Classroom Use, Curriculum, And Peer Learning

Transcript

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:19

Do you want to play? It's a phrase every child knows. However, the pastime isn't just a distraction. It's a blueprint for learning, resilience, and creativity. From ancient Egyptian board games to Minecraft worlds built black by black, games have always helped us learn how to survive, collaborate, and imagine new possibilities. Today we ask, what happens when students don't just play games, but create them? Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation, and resources. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables? And how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? From carved stones in ancient Mesopotamia to algorithm-powered platforms today, humans have always played games. Long before formal schooling, games helped us practice survival, build community, and pass on knowledge. They are our earliest simulations, safe ways to experiment with rules, outcomes, and ideas. Game theorist Roger Kalios, writing in the mid-20th century, classified human play into forms like competition, chance, mimicry, and exploration. These same forms show up today in everything from chess and tag to Minecraft and Roblox. And the educational value of game making is no longer just intuitive, it's supported by research. A 2021 study in educational technology research and development found that students who create their own games show significant gains not only in technical skills like coding, but also in creativity, collaboration, and resilience. Game designer and researcher Jane McGonagall has spent her career showing how the mechanics of play with clear goals, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation can drive motivation and learning. In her book Reality is Broken, she argues that games can be designed to address real-world problems and enhance individual and collective well-being. And she puts it simply: reality is broken. Game designers can fix it. That idea is more than philosophical, it's actionable. When students design their own games, they aren't just learning to code. They're learning to think systematically, solve creatively, and take ownership of challenges. It's a mindset shift from passive learning to purposeful creation, which brings us to today's guest, Matt Dalio, who is putting that philosophy into practice. Matt is the founder of Endless Studios and Endless Foundation, two organizations reimagining what it means for students to learn and lead in the digital age. His work blends the creative challenge of game making with a mission of equity, ensuring that students have access to tools they need to become digital creators. Through Endless Studios, students explore coding, design, and problem solving by building their own games. Meanwhile, the Endless Foundation expands access to affordable technology and offline first learning tools, helping close the digital divide for learners around the world. Well, welcome, Matt, to the brighter side of education.

Matt Dalio: 3:38

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 3:39

What do you think is broken about how we are preparing young people for the real world? And how do you think that game making offers a better path?

Matt Dalio: 3:48

The world's changed a lot and the education system hasn't. But especially with AI coming, there are people who are even on the frontier of tech who are way behind in the world we have today. The mission we're on, which is to make sure that every kid in the world who wants to have a good education and be ready for the workforce as it lives today and in the future is able to do that. That really actually feels like an existential challenge to us in that AI is coming. AI is going to wipe away so many jobs. And the world in which everyone has all of their income opportunities wiped away, versus a world in which everyone is a power user of AI, capable of becoming, you know, superhumans, commanding magic out into the world, manifesting their dreams as, you know, with swarms of AI is working at their behest. Like a world in which every kid has access to that skill set as they graduate into the world, and a world in which every kid doesn't, to kind of be binary about it for a second, is a very different version of humanity. I'll just kind of give you some of the philosophical or historical grounding, but I think about it a lot, which is that when the printing press came out, everyone thinks the world changed immediately, but it really didn't. Like the nature of the church's role in society and politics, that did change. And interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci was born the same year as the printing press. So you had things like the high renaissance that were able to happen that could not have happened without the printing press. But for the average person, their life did not change. They were on a farm when the printing press was invented, and they were on a farm hundreds of years later. And it wasn't until one country invested in literacy that the world changed. To track literacy rates over those years, for hundreds of years, they basically didn't increase. It looked almost flat. There's one country that invested in building an empire, and they needed to educate their people to build an empire. This was the UK. But to teach people, you have to teach them to read and write. And so when the UK hit 65% literacy, majority literacy, the industrial revolution happened. And it was the industrial revolution that changed everything about the way everyone lived. What it takes to build an industrial revolution, it takes an entire society being capable of contributing, an entire society lifted up. So the parallel to today is that we have this incredible tool that people talk about as the printing press of our time, whether that's the internet or AI, it's the same concept. These incredibly powerful tools. But if you look at the percentage of today's society that's capable of reading and writing in this thing called software, in other words, true fluency, the literacy rates today for that tool are lower than actual literacy rates in the dark ages. So when I think literacy, I mean I can create, I can do the things in Silicon Valley that people are doing to push the frontiers across so many different topics. And so our mission is to build a world in which that literacy is totally democratized. So now when I go back to your question of like what's broken about society, fundamentally the people who are supposed to teach the skills that humanity depends on don't have those skills themselves.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 6:52

I think that that's been recognized as a key element and a gap in the knowledge that we definitely need to know it before we can pass it on.

Matt Dalio: 7:01

The teachers are a linchpin to the mentorship and the humanity and the guiding of the hand, those teachers need to be scaffold with an infrastructure that makes them successful. But how you democratize access to the tools led us to realize you have to also then teach the skills when people have the tools. Our answers to that question came in the form of games. I remember walking into a classroom for the first time and seeing the entire classroom was erupting in numbers as they were shouting their multiplication tables because it was in the form of a game. Games can engage. That's the hardest challenge in education. And the second insight was I was curious how our engineers had learned to code. And I've heard the same answer over and over again. And it was as a kid, I loved games. And then I discovered I could hack my games. And so that story I just heard over and over again across our team. Mark Zuckerberg learned this way, and Elon Musk learned this way. And I got to meet Bill Gates and I asked him, What was your first experience? And he's like, Yeah, the first thing I ever coded was a game. And so if this is the way that all these tech titans are learning the hardest technical skill, there are many technical skills, design, art, you know, project management, lots of them, but the hardest of them is code. And if they're all learning it the same way, why aren't we teaching this way? That makes so much sense. Yes. In practice, when you take all the ingredients that you would want in a really highly engaging hands-on project for a project-based digital literacy experience, and you kind of shake those all up, I kind of say, like, throw all the ingredients in a black box, shake them up, see what comes out the other end. Literally, the only thing that comes out the other end is a game. The ingredients I put in there, it has to be obviously engaging, it has to be multidisciplinary, it needs to involve right brain and left brain. And so when you wrap those skills around something creative and nimble that they're excited about that is so multidisciplinary and that requires them to collaborate across the disciplines, you end up teaching the most employable skills in today's and the future workforce.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 9:00

How would teachers use that?

Matt Dalio: 9:02

Um, so before I answer that question, education is traditionally do you know what a network effect is? A network effect is the core of basically every tech product in the world, which is that the more people join it, the better it gets. Uber is a network effect. The more drivers there are, the better it is for the passengers, the more passengers there are, the better it is for the network, the drivers, and the more you go everywhere, the better it is. So everyone who gets added to that network makes the network better.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 9:29

Right.

Matt Dalio: 9:30

Education is the classic anti-network effect. And yet there are three billion youth under the age of 25 years old that we have to teach. So we have traditional education structured in classrooms where you have anti-network effects. The smaller it is, the better, the bigger it is, the worse it is. Just as a by and large. So the question of what would it look like for education to be a network effect? In other words, the more people are in this educational experience, the better it is. If you look at GitHub, GitHub is, you know, I often describe the best school in the world. And I define best on two levels. One is how many people is it teaching? It's a hundred million people in GitHub, which is why it's so good. There are a hundred million people in there all working on different projects, all different skill levels. So you could find, you know, people who have your same passions and interests, and you can learn from them all collaboratively, and you can join projects and they can mentor you because they're trying to do the projects. So it's it's a hundred million of those. And it's also I define best as does it like, you know, does it get you the job? A very important role of education is to teach you to do the job. Well, the best way to learn to do the job is to do the job. And so the 100 million people inside of GitHub are actually doing the job. They are in the place that their work takes place. And so when they come in, whether they're, you know, at the top of that skill curve or a total novice, whether they're 15 years old or 50 years old, they are in a common community creating together, doing the real job. And in fact, when when you go to Silicon Valley tech startups and you ask, how do you hire? They don't care what degree you got from what university you got it from. They don't care about your transcript or your GPA. I mean, sure they may look at those, but the thing that they actually look at is your code in GitHub. Really? What have you built? Show me the code. And then you care about what are you like to work with. In an open community like this, you have visibility into both. The work is work on real projects. All of that mentorship, implicit mentorship for the hundred million people, they don't have to pay a dime for it. Wow. So I say that because there are the two main pillars of what we do that I have to put on the table before I answer the direct question of like, and how does someone do this? Okay. The first is wow, games are a great teaching environment. And the other one is wow, GitHub's a great teaching environment. Yeah. So let's merge those. Okay. Okay. Now I can answer your question, which is to do what we've just described. You've built that curriculum. Because to oversimplify the world of game creation, you have things like Minecraft, which six-year-olds can use. Right. But it's not real games you're building inside of there. It's not real skills you're building inside of there. And then on the other end, you have real tools like Unity, which 70% of the world's games are built on top of, it is the professional game engine. But if you took a college student and put them in there for weeks, they might be able to build a game. It's very complicated. It's a professional tool. So what we had to build, not because we wanted to get people into the professional tools, was a tool that made it so simple that a six-year-old could go and place blocks to use that mechanic, because every kid knows how to use that place block mechanic. And when you look at the tool just as a first snapshot, you're like, oh, this is a Minecraft clone, which we want. But then what we do is we put inside of it all of the layers of the onion that allow you to scaffold back into the professional tool. So it's built on Unity. And we do things like have levers that open doors with wiring systems that can get very complex in the logic, that rule down to rule blocks that you can create that teach computational thinking, down to a scripting layer so that you can see what others have scripted in real code and tweak it or write your own scripts, or in the future use AI to help you write scripts, which then also brings you into Unity, where you can make custom textures and custom props and custom characters. And that brings you into tools like Blender, which is a 3D modeling, industry standard 3D modeling software.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 13:27

Wow.

Matt Dalio: 13:28

And so it's this sort of journey that walks you really slowly, whether you are you want to get there in five hours or five days or five years, walks you very slowly into at every step of the experience learning and delighting, but slowly walking into true professional industry standard tools.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 13:46

Wow.

Matt Dalio: 13:46

So the most concrete answer to how someone can, you know, kind of deploy what we're doing is that tool. It's called NSTAR. It's on our website, endlessstudios.com. And you you can go download and use it. It's free. Teachers were like, oh my God, I've never seen this kid so engaged. Because when we present, we have a five-minute spiel we give. Before we're done with the five-minute spiel, the kids are already off and running. They're not paying attention to us. They did things that our engineers were shocked they had done. Like they made this like waves of spike traps. It was like, how did you do that? And it was so cool because one kid had the idea and you could see that kid shared it with another kid. And next thing you know, it's in two games in the same classroom because peer-to-peer learning is happening. So that's the simplest, frankly, is go get that tool. Um, and unfortunately, right now it's not on mobile yet, but it will be. Ultimately, where we aspire to get is to be a community where any teacher or anyone who doesn't have a teacher can come use these tools and to lean on your peers in the community and join projects that are bigger than their own. So the playing will teach you the foundational skills to be able to do more. And then we launch you into more, which is you're off and running, and there's just a whole community, and and literally you could do it for a lifetime.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 14:59

So now a teacher, if she was to do this, does she have like a class? Does everybody just do this on their own? Like what supervision is there?

Matt Dalio: 15:07

Yeah, it's a great question. Um, we're in the middle of a adding classroom management features to make it really easy for teachers to deploy it into classrooms. But uh, you know, the the the simplest answer today is go download it, have your kids download it, put it on the uh on the computers and and basically just go play. Yes. We do have curriculum that we have not put online openly. But if anyone wants this, email me at m atendlessstudios.com. I'm always scared to put my email address out there, but uh we'll see how that goes. I am slow to respond on email, so don't take it personally, but but I'll make sure it gets to the right people. But we're happy to send along the materials. If enough people ask, we'll just put them in the right place on the website um so that people can take them. But the idea is that we've created literally an entire course and and there are different lengths of course, everything from like I have three hours, let me do something, or I have an hour, all the way to I have three months, and I want to walk my students through this experience. And so we have all of the kind of the PDFs with the pedagogy designed in a way that it's very easy for a teacher with no experience to go in and teach it. All the materials are there, links to the how-to videos are there, links to all of the relevant materials, so that again, the idea is the student doesn't have to worry about not having access to this, and therefore also the teacher doesn't have to worry. What we want is teachers to be able to do what they do best, which is to have the human connection, the guidance, the mentorship, to bring whatever skills they have. If someone is the coding teacher or the geometry teacher or the art teacher, they should all be able to teach this. This shouldn't be relegated to like only the computer science teacher can teach 21st century skills because 21st century skills are all of the disciplines. The history teacher should be able to come in and say, let's use this game to build games that teach about history. It's like the equivalent of a digital diorama. To make a game is a totally different thing than to play a game. From the skills you build to the endorphins that they pull, the parts of the brain that they activate.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 16:58

Yes.

Matt Dalio: 16:59

But we just see this kind of universal engagement, especially among youth.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 17:04

So I just love that this is tapping into both. Games are just very natural to us. You know, we want to make them and they're fun to do.

Matt Dalio: 17:22

Kids play because what they learn in play teaches them what they will ultimately need to be successful in our tribes as adults.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 17:30

Very true.

Matt Dalio: 17:31

And somewhere along the way, you ask the question about like what's wrong with education. And we take the play, we take the fun out of learning. Yeah, we know scientifically we learn more when we're having fun. And so, you know, one of the the aspirations that we have for for the tool that I described before, which is kind of one part of what we're doing, but a very central part, is the aspiration that teachers will start using it themselves to build games, to teach the things that they want their students to learn, and that that will grow an ecosystem of learning games. Because today, learning games cost too much to build. And so you really can't build quality learning games at the scale that's necessary. Learning and games used to be so tightly tied together: SimCity, Civilization, Oregon Trail, like these were things that the teachers and parents wanted their kids to be in because they were good for them. And then somewhere along the way, they spread out, right? That the games became so big, and the budgets for consumer games were like Grand Theft Auto became billion-dollar budgets. It there's just such a difference between the quality of one and the other. And so, in building a tool that makes it really easy to build highly engaging games that look like the types of games that one would expect as a consumer in this modern landscape, but make it really easy for teachers to then do it in ways that teach. You can create kind of this proliferation of games that you want your kids to play.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 18:54

So if you go in there, would you have the ability to have that type of art and dynamics, you know, that you would see in something like Fortnite, let's say, versus something like Frogger?

Matt Dalio: 19:05

That's a super, super, super, super important point. Is it has to be 3D in some sense. Like it has to be visually gorgeous, it has to be enrapturing because those quality games are that way. So, you know, we are deliberately building the tools so that anyone can make it feel like whatever they want. You want a Candyland game, great, go for it. You want a you know, cyberpunk game, go for it. Like, and our aspiration is that it looks like whatever the the audience wants it to look like, but that it always looks like high quality products.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 19:36

And it would be like a Wix website, for instance. And so I build it on my own, but I have no coding background whatsoever.

Matt Dalio: 19:44

And and like Wix, you you can do the whole thing with no code at all. And you can also go do custom scripts. It's a really good tool to scaffold you into learning because you can the scripts are simple and you can wrap your head around them, and then that can teach you how to build real websites. So it's exactly what you just described. I don't need any code at all. Right. But I also have wiring systems that teach me computational thinking. It's built on Unity, the most popular game engine of the world. So you have access to Unity under the hood. It's not little tool. It's no, it's Unity you have access to.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:16

What age would you use it most?

Matt Dalio: 20:18

So a six-year-old can go download this tool.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:20

Wow.

Matt Dalio: 20:21

Go for a run run with it. Our primary focus is is older, it's college and high school. And that's also the most urgent because you have a whole generation of youth graduating with AI coming. We're kind of chipping away at each part of the curve, but the hardest part is the part that we're cracking right now, which is build a community where like the best students in the world and the best game makers in the world all want to build together.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:44

And then you build the on-ramp for more people at younger and younger ages to be able to go into and you're helping address the digital divide and making game making more available to all. You're talking about device and internet access. How is how is Endless addressing this?

Matt Dalio: 21:00

Endless has a to oversimplify um a company and a foundation. The foundation was really born out of what I started doing. And for about a decade, I focused on laptop access in emerging markets. How do you make the most powerful educational and creation tool in history available to the 5 billion people who don't have it? Um, and if you don't have internet access, how do you still make it useful? And the long story short is that a pay as you go financing mechanism that makes now financing available to people who normally aren't credit worthy makes it so that now about a billion, two billion, maybe three billion more people can't afford it at the price point that that that that unlocks, you know, which is about $10 to $15 a month. And then on the internet side, fill it with all the useful content so that when they connect to the internet, it refreshes. But if they're not on the internet, it's still useful. And so those two things unlock um a lot more people being able to have access to it. And we actually, just by coincidence, this week um signed a very, very exciting uh contract to distribute laptops to the largest solar panel distributor in in Africa. So they're going to be rolling out cool things there. Um, we're doing stuff with one of the large banks in Latin America. Anyway, so cool things happening on that front. But the answer to the question ultimately for how you make it so that everyone can have access to the skills is that they have to also have access to the tools. I often describe kind of this notion of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yes. It's like hierarchy, this pyramid hierarchy of educational needs. You have to have electricity to get a laptop, you have to have a laptop to get internet, you have to have internet to get the digital skills, you have to have the skills to get the job. And then if you have the job, you can, you know, self-actualization. And so in partnering with the electricity providers to distribute the laptops and making it so that the internet is optional, not irrelevant, but optional, means that now anyone anywhere can have the skills. And so when you teach those skills to wherever they are, that person is now all of a sudden an employable human being.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 22:52

What's the biggest opportunity you see right now to empower youth?

Matt Dalio: 22:56

Teach them to be the power user of AI. There are layers that are not that hard to learn. Like literally, if you just go to YouTube and you look at tools like N8N and Zapier, it's someone who's curious and has the time. And so when you can use the vessel of games, because that gets people excited, and the community where they can learn from each other and depend on each other to teach these kinds of skills, those are the skills that will get you jobs. That person is unfirable.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 23:26

That's wonderful advice, and it's definitely where we are headed.

Matt Dalio: 23:30

Could I add one last thought on AI? School measures the inputs. Like, did I write the essay or not? And there are really, really important reasons for which that is true. I just want to add that the world measures you by the outputs, the outcomes. Did you hit your KPI? Did you did you reach that number of users? Did you hit your revenue targets? Did you hit your sales targets? So when I hire a marketer as an example, I'm looking for the output. I don't care if they wrote the copy. I don't care. I have I don't care at all what inputs they used. In fact, the less they used, then the more capacity I have for them to deliver more. It's a very different outlook. Yeah. There's a great book called Measure What Matters. If you measure what matters in the academic context, and it's the same as in the work context. And then you teach people how to do the thing that makes them succeed at the thing that matters, then you're likely to teach people how to do what matters.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 24:25

I really appreciate you coming and talking about ways that we can prepare our students and even ourselves to be able to navigate this space more confidently and with more purpose. What you're doing with Endless and both the studios and the foundation side is allowing more people to be able to access that. So thank you.

Matt Dalio: 24:43

Thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 24:45

If today's episode reminded you of the creative power of play, I encourage you to explore how game making can be part of your classroom or home. In a time of rapid change, game making may be one of the most human things we can teach. Let's make space for it. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at Lisa at drlisaarhassler.com or visit my website at www.drlisaarhassler.com and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.