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What if learning felt like playing — and retention was built into the design?
In this episode, Rob interviews Aldi Agaj, CEO of Alter Learning, who shares how his team builds educational video games in collaboration with scientists, educators, and developers. From failures to scaling 40+ games, Aldi reveals how passion, teamwork, and gamification fuel long-term engagement and real-world impact in education.

Chief Executive Officer of AAK Tele-Science , And CEO of Alter-Learning Educational Platform from since 2020. He’s an Entrepreneurial Chief Executive Officer, experienced in founding companies in domestic and international marketplaces. Facilitator and builder of world-class technology. Provides technical and visionary leadership for technology company offering a Cloud-Based Platform as a Service (SaaS) for Scientific Research.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

Guest Links and Info

• • Website: alter-learning.com
  • LinkedIn: Aldi Agaj

 

Links to episode mentions:

• • Recommended book: Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Favorite game: Volleyball

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

• • FREE Gamification Resources!
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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Aldi Agaj (00:00)
We failed. There’s no shame to fail when you try to do something honest. And we failed because we didn’t understand what the market wants.

Rob (00:08)
Hey Engagers, as you know, this is Professor Game, where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply retention and engagement. And I’m Rob, I’m a consultant, I’m a coach, and I’m the founder of Professor Game, where we do many things. Among them, I myself, I teach gamification, game-based learning, game-based solutions at many places around the world, including many universities. And if you are struggling with retention and or loyalty, feel free to look into our

free resources in the description. And today we have Aldi with us. So Aldi, we do need to know before we introduce you, are you prepared to engage?

Aldi Agaj (00:48)
I am always prepared to engage. mean, that’s the hope of every gamification industry. Like if you don’t engage, then you are in the wrong business.

Rob (00:58)
Absolutely Aldi ⁓

Aldi Agaj (01:02)
everybody mess me spell it. It’s fine.

Rob (01:05)
He’s a chief executive officer of AAK Telescience and the CEO of Alter Learning Educational Platform since 2020. He’s an entrepreneurial chief executive officer who’s experienced in founding companies in domestic and international marketplaces. He’s a facilitator and builder of world-class technology, and he provides technical and visionary leadership for technology company offering a cloud-based platform or a service as a software for scientific research.

As you can see, he has plenty of experience, lots of exciting stuff going on. Aldi, is there anything that we’re missing from that intro?

Aldi Agaj (01:40)
Look, I believe that the titles are less important than actually the work we do on a daily basis. And many people focus a lot on writing everything they can on LinkedIn. By the way, that was not done by me, by my marketing team. And I think like, you just can say that he’s a guy who has multiple hats. wasn’t happy with that. you know, I’m here. no, you absolutely

Rob (02:01)
Absolutely Aldi, if it were to follow you around for a day or a week whatever you want to go for, what would that look like? What does it feel like to be on your shoes nowadays?

Aldi Agaj (02:12)
⁓ Well, it’s beautiful and the same time challenging. We started two companies when the COVID hit, July 16, 2020. And as many people understand, it is not easy. A lot of people were closing down. There was no possibility to ⁓ open an office, to have people, to create a relationship. So the first thing that we had to challenge is, okay, we are going to start new, fresh, a company with everybody being remote.

anywhere in the world. Today we have in the past four and a half years, so in July 16 is going to be five years, we have had 862 people collaborating in these two companies in 18 countries and 56 projects all around the world. So organization and management, it’s quite challenging sometimes, you know, because you are talking to somebody in India, in Pakistan, in Italy, in France, in Germany, Belgium, everywhere in the world, you have to coordinate that.

So you don’t have a time. You, wake up sometime at 3 AM in morning. I got to sleep and I wake up again at 6 AM in the morning, like this morning happened. And then I go to sleep when I get to to Siesta and in between, if I have a break and then you wake up again and you have to talk to your team. And maybe because I like to be hands on, there’s different types of styles. let’s see.

Rob (03:30)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Love it. So Aldi, can you tell us a story, especially in this game-based learning ⁓ space that you’re in with Alter Learning, where things just did not go your way? a first attempt at learning or a fail moment? It doesn’t have to be a definitive because, you know, failure is not fatal, it’s not final, but we want to be there with you. We want to live that story and perhaps take a few lessons.

Aldi Agaj (03:53)
⁓ The first game company that I started was called Green Science Games. Actually it was one game and we wanted to create educational video games and to teach children about the green industry. We wanted to teach children learning to respect the earth as they live. Think this way, we’re teaching the new generation something and you have to start by teaching them that earth is one.

And have to teach them how to protect it and how to be respectful to all creatures and all peoples on earth and most importantly, earth itself. But it was a very small company, according to our investors and to people who were interested. It had very narrow scope and they thought that because the game was only one, it was called Green Science Games. Wouldn’t have gone well because investors would have not invested in one game. So we were like the tiny studio we just started.

And we were trying to figure things out as well, like many other startups do. And we learned very fast that although the idea behind was very good, I ⁓ truly believe in that, in fact, it’s part of the after learning now, we didn’t throw it out. As a company, Green Science Games did not succeed because the scope of it was very narrow. So that was one thing that I’m honest to say, like that we didn’t succeed. We failed.

There’s no shame to fail when you try to do something honest and we failed because we didn’t understand what the market wanted. The market wanted that you do a beautiful game. It’s called Green Science Games. And then they ask you, and then what? You know, so is this one single game going to be sufficient to educate the children all over the world? Is it going to be able to compete with all the offers that you have around the world of education content? And of course we…

New in the startup industry. We didn’t know that. So we feel that it’s a very honor. And that was the, uh, an aspect that we talked to an investor at the time. And then this, I’m not going to mention her because she’s still invested and she works, uh, some major companies. And she advised me on that meeting to say like, you should enlarge the scope because if you want to attract investor like me to give you money to finance your education content.

platform, you have to also see the point of view of how am I going to make my money back.

Yeah, that was something that is a idealistic I can be as a CEO. You when you start the Ecologomani green science games, you kind of figure it out why we did it. There was the idea behind it. And by the way, we are based in Davis, California is famous for agricultural research. So that was a shock for me. like, oh, damn it, I have never considered the point of view of investors. I only considered what good we’re doing for the world.

But we need money to make it happen. that was one failure that ⁓ I have no problem.

Rob (07:05)
Is there something that, you know, seeing it today, seeing it nowadays, you would do entirely different? Like you would approach it in different way. You would start a different way. Like what would you change if you had a similar opportunity coming up and you were going to develop one of these games or something?

Aldi Agaj (07:22)
You know, there is a big saying in Italian, don’t know if you know that. se il mano si fa il mondo. It means that you do not build the world with what if, what then, so. Sometimes you are faced with choices in that moment. And even the mistake that you make in that moment are very useful, actually. So would you change anything? No, because if I changed that, I wouldn’t have learned things that I learned.

I, you can go backwards, you know, that is the same. Or if I knew that, well, of course, if you knew that you were done another thing, but then the world would be completely different. You know, you are not going to be facing the issues that you have facing that help you grow. So I wouldn’t change anything. I actually think that is very important for every startup to start with a very big passion about what they’re creating.

Rob (08:17)
Fantastic. No, it makes sense. It makes sense. And from your experience, plenty of time you’ve been doing this, especially, in the game-based solution space, is there some success you’d like to talk of? One of those games you created, perhaps, how it went, how you managed to make it a success, what went well, don’t know, anything you want to talk about.

Aldi Agaj (08:41)
Imagine this way, we have to agree on what would define success. Okay? Because that’s a very tricky question. What do you define as a success? What I define as a success is being able to involve hundreds and hundreds of scientists, doctors, child development specialists, teachers to work on a concept. I want to create something like outer learning.

because they believe that the future of our children is important. That for me is success. I’m not a billionaire. So I don’t know how Jeff Bezos feels or Mark Zuckerberg feels or I’m not. So I don’t know how they feel. But I believe that also them when they started Amazon, when they started Facebook, when they started Tesla, when they started any other company in the world, they had a huge passion about it.

And success is when other people share your passion for something and they create something useful. In our case, it’s an educational gaming platform. So that is my success, that we managed to convince hundreds and hundreds of people to create now 40 games and going in a platform available for every public school in the world for free. I call that success. call success… Fantastic.

Any person who comes to my company and says like, I want to be an affiliate on your company because I want to share the information about your games and how they’re built and what they’re built for.

Is that success a billion, trillion dollar industry? I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s never going to be. I mean, like there is no big money in education as we all know. And we are offering for free to public schools. So our goal is not exactly to make a billion dollars a month. Our goal was we want the best that the scientific research can offer to children everywhere in the world. And if they are in the public school, they have it for free.

Rob (10:46)
Sounds great. And Aldi, you mentioned that you have already around 40 games and counting, as you mentioned. So when you come up with creating a new game, what is the process? How do you go about it? You mentioned scientists are involved. I’m guessing game designers are involved. How does it go? How do you create that engagement that you’ve been mentioning?

Aldi Agaj (11:09)
Remember when I showed you a KTEL science on and remember when I was.

Rob (11:14)
We had some screen views as well.

Aldi Agaj (11:17)
Yeah, remember when I was sharing the screen, I was showing you the universities and the patents and projects that they create? Now that information is public information. But that information is gold actually, because that information shows you the latest in technology that every researcher in the world has done. Imagine people who have dedicated 20 plus years of their life to study an argument and study very well. And they know everything about that argument. They are doing a PhD, a postdoc, they do publications.

Those publications are the latest in technology. But we take those and we write a GDD, game design document. The GDD is passed then to my team of concept art, to the art, Kristen Robertson. She and one of her team defined art style and so on. You know, you have to also keep in mind that we have a K to 12 type of priority right now. So K to 12 means children age of five to 18. I call it children, some of them are gonna be offended because I call them children, but…

The point is when you are a five year old and when you are an 18 year old, there’s a lot in between. the learning capacity that they have, it’s not so different. You’ll be surprised. So you start creating educational games that can be understood from a child of five years old, and you start increasing the difficulty and the details on that game step by step until it’s now suitable for a child or a young adult that is 18 years old.

that thinks it knows everything about the world and very soon is going to learn that he does or she does. ⁓ So this is the point. We create education games that can guide them through the process of learning in school.

Rob (12:58)
So it’s kind of the same game they would potentially be playing, quote unquote, the same game when they’re in first grade. And then again, they could be playing the same game in seventh grade.

Aldi Agaj (13:08)
No, no, no. They have the first game in first grade that has topics that have been decided with teachers. There are topics that follow what is called the common core from schools that are gamified. Then second level is maybe the same game, but is second level now and is adopted for children in second grade and so on. And then maybe you have other games because they have finished now. Not important for them.

different things, for example, for high school where you have human anatomy, genetics, and so on for biology. So you can start with very simple games, which are almost casual games. You can make them on 2D and 3D. But imagine that way. You need to start getting the attention of the child. And you have to provide them with something they actually understand and they can play. And what they don’t understand is that they are learning while they’re playing.

And then you start increasing the difficulty of the game or the levels of the game or the game itself, it changes to be adapted to the learning capacity and the knowledge of each grade.

Rob (14:14)
Gotcha. Very interesting model. I like it. And talking about those recommendations, that’s the way that sort of the model that you have, so you can reach pretty much K through 12. Is there a best practice when you’re creating these games? Is there something you say, well, we always do this thing because it makes our projects a little or a lot better, or it ensures certain things that we want to make sure?

Aldi Agaj (14:39)
We have three, of course we have a best practice policy in place in Alta Learning. But what is the main thing that I’m proud of, that I insisted to create, is that we never create a game without a scientist and expert integrated in that part. Which means, you can have a beautiful zombie apocalypse game done with amazing graphics. You’re always the AK-47, there’s always a zombie working and so on, but it cannot gamify

scientific research because the engineer who did it doesn’t know nothing about it. The second aspect that we are very proud of is the fact that we always involve teachers and child development specialists in the levels of the game and who they are adapting because nobody knows better than a teacher what they’re going to teach in classroom. So you make a game based on the knowledge of an engineer that game can be amazing in graphics.

Amazing in ⁓ gamification so guess what what does it Nothing and you take a scientist And you take a teacher We’re now screaming at each other sometime because the scientists want to fix things in a certain way And the teacher keeps saying like no he’s a five-year-old he doesn’t understand that and then you put an engineer in the middle Okay, how about I make this gamification this this way this way and the GDD is being written while we go

that there’s not one person who decides in my company ever on a game. It’s really always a group effort because if those groups don’t work together, they can’t. They really can’t. I can show you right now a group of 16 people talking about one game.

Rob (16:29)
Makes sense. It’s a multidisciplinary approach. I actually, one of the things I teach is, supply chain management and operations. And one of the things when people are creating new products and sort of the traditional approaches, you have what they call over the wall. So, you know, the design team creates something and then they sort of throw the design over the wall to the implementation team. And then the, the, the, the manufacturer, that’s the traditional thing. The problem is you don’t realize many of the issues that will arise and then you have to sort of throw it back.

over the wall, but they’re not really communicating. like, this doesn’t work. So kind of fix it. Please go ahead and remember, remember some of you are, I know, I know, I know. I’m just saying that engages, if you’re listening in and there’s something that you don’t understand, you want to view, you can definitely check this out as well on our YouTube channel. Yeah. Go ahead.

Aldi Agaj (17:07)
I I’m not going to take too many

Look at here.

This is an interesting sound thing that we have here.

You are a gaming guy, so you know what they’re talking about.

how many people there are, reader plan.

they’re working on.

Rob (17:45)
Plenty of people. think from what I can see it’s like 14 people, 17 on that one. Well Firefly is also on the call. But yeah, seems like at least 14 people are on that call.

Aldi Agaj (17:56)
This is the plan for collaborative environment meeting. This is where they’re defining the reader plan. And so on. So I want to show you also how the tasks are assigned. This is a combat board like Agile mythology. JIRA, we have our own, but just like any other one of those. And now you can see exactly what I showed you. We have everyone involved in that process.

Everyone is working on the game, the gamification process and so on. Amazing. One game.

Rob (18:33)
Sounds amazing.

Absolutely. So Aldi, after listening to these questions or answering these questions actually, is there somebody that you could think of that maybe inspired you, somebody that essentially somebody you would like to see as a future guest on the podcast? Somebody that you say, I know that if this person answered these questions, I’d be really, really interested for whatever reason you can find.

Aldi Agaj (18:58)
Well, I would love for you guys to invite some scientists. So the people who inspired me to do that, like I said, we are based in Davis, California. UC Davis has a lot of good scientists that they are actually doing a lot of scientific research. Some of these guys collaborated with us ⁓ and shared the ideas with us, like for marine biology, for different scientific areas that we apply. And these guys have a lot to say. So it would be very nice to see how

they can actually contribute to the share of knowledge in the future. And this is maybe narrow to my experience and my expertise, you know, it’s a narrow focus, but I think scientists will have a lot to say on different aspects of gamification and involving all humans to understand how science is done and how the answers of science are actually correct. They’re not opinionable always, unfortunately. They are not always the ones that we want to hear, but they are correct and they will share

with us a vision of the world that we might want to know.

Rob (20:04)
Makes sense. Love it. Having a scientist on the show. be interesting. We’ve had a few ⁓ scientists in different fields like neuroscience and all that tends to be related to, you know, what parts of the brain or that kind of stuff are related to video games, gaming, and these kinds of structures. But it might even be interesting to have somebody, as you were mentioning, from that field that we recently had from the environmental action plans we had, Katie. But I never thought about it that way. Could be interesting. We’ll take a look into that.

And keeping up with recommendations, Aldi, how about a book? Which book would you recommend and why?

Aldi Agaj (20:40)
I don’t know. You know, it’s interesting.

I read a lot of Tolkien when I was young. I think that the imagination that he has, I don’t know if you ever read the Simbaryllian. He’s famous for Lord of the Rings, Hobbit and so on.

Rob (21:10)
Yeah, the

Lerner is like a compilation of the unfinished work he had and it’s huge.

Aldi Agaj (21:14)
Exactly. Yeah.

And I loved it because it was not finished, it allowed you actually to use your imagination and to finish it yourself. So you can go on two aspects. You can read romance, you can read as long as you read is good. But ⁓ if I have to say one and I have to recommend one, I always want to recommend to everybody to read something that is unfinished and then they to choose their own path and finish it their own way. And the reason for that is because it’s always right.

the way you finish your world is always correct.

There’s no better one.

Rob (21:52)
Yeah, and there’s even these, I loved these especially when I was a kid, these build your own adventure, create your own adventure books, right? There’s many different endings and many different paths, almost infinite you can even think of. They’re almost like a game in many ways. You’re creating your own path, your own ways to arrive. You know, I’m sure that they designed it such that you had just a set amount of endings, but you know, even still you…

you created your own thing and you try to do it again, maybe you won’t be able to. You try to go down that path once more and it’s not necessarily going to be possible. It’s very nice.

Aldi Agaj (22:28)
Remember when you asked me, what would you do different? And I told you nothing, because that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to do it differently.

Rob (22:35)
Yeah, of course. course. Aldi, what would you say is your superpower? That thing that you do at least better than most other people?

Aldi Agaj (22:43)
I never give up.

Rob (22:46)
Very, very good one. Very useful in this world especially.

Aldi Agaj (22:50)
You can’t. You can’t afford it.

Rob (22:53)
Well, many people do give up and that’s part of the beauty of having that as a superpower for sure. Ali, if I were to ask you what is your favorite game, you can take that question as you wish. What would that game be and why, of course?

Aldi Agaj (23:12)
My favorite game, the ones I make, that will be unfair, so I’m not going to answer that. Exactly. favorite game, because that will be promoting my company. I mean, I want you guys to go and check it out. Absolutely. it’s not fair. My favorite game on plane, I play volleyball. I like group games. ⁓

I played volleyball for the past seven years every time I can. And there is a reason why I like volleyball. It’s a team sport. If you are on sand or on grass or whatever indoors and you play a game in five people and you are not coordinated, your team will lose. Like in any other game, team sport. And that has told me that also in my company, if I am not a team player,

company will fail. I’m very honest. Our company survived these past five years thanks to our team. Not many much about me, but the amazing people who actually believed in this project and they continue to be with me and collaborate with me and find solutions, problems that they will appear every day. But if you’re not a team player, you’re done.

Rob (24:23)
Beautiful. Lovely reference. Most people tend to go to board games or video games. Very few tend to go to sports as games. It’s not the usual reference most people have in mind. But when people say, I don’t like games, I always say, what do you watch sports? Is there any sport you like? That’s where you get them. There’s always something. be golf, typical executive sport or whatnot. People say, I don’t like fun. What do you mean you don’t like fun? That doesn’t make sense. ⁓

Aldi Agaj (24:52)
You remind me of This is funny. So one of our guys that started in the beginning with us on Green Science Games, he invited me a couple of times to go play in golf. He thought that CEO should know how to play golf. Oh boy, I’m so bad at golf that I think I start cutting the trees around because I can walk in around this damn thing, you know, and I was so bad and I…

didn’t find it enjoyable. thought it was boring. One, because I was bad about it. So I understand if you’re good, maybe you enjoy it. Two, because I just didn’t understand. It’s not my personality to understand that the golf club kind of personality. It’s just not mine. I really am not built that way. So I’m like, hmm.

Nah, not mine, so…

Rob (25:41)
It’s

not my thing. Like there’s people, you you’re in the US, so there’s people like American football or, you know, football. There’s people like soccer or the way they, you know, there’s people like baseball.

Aldi Agaj (25:53)
I’m not very my knees don’t I’m not Ronaldo. Unfortunately, I wish I was but I’m not so I can’t fake it ⁓

Rob (26:02)
I was born the same year as Ronaldo. I don’t look, you know, even 10 % as good physically as he does.

Aldi Agaj (26:10)
Well, yeah, that’s the point. You have to choose who you are. if I can put my two cents, that’s why I decided to create education video games. Games give you that capacity. You can learn the way you are.

Rob (26:25)
Fantastic.

You can be yourself. Yeah, absolutely.

Aldi Agaj (26:33)
So imagine the beauty of being in a video game. Now, you can be on… That’s a dangerous zone, but I’m gonna stop you in second there. You can be whatever you want in the game. Your persona can change, your avatar can change. But because you have that freedom, you can learn the way you like it. Have you ever done something that you actually like? When is the last time you have done something that you really, really like, you enjoyed it?

you

Rob (27:04)
Many times like recently last few days. I have a two year two and a half year old So I do that pretty often with stuff with her and and I play games as well. There’s plenty of stuff I enjoy eating

Aldi Agaj (27:15)
Also, I like for me, if you want to know personal things of mine, my peace place is sailing. I love going sailing.

When I take my daughter sailing in the middle of ocean, ⁓ it’s pure joy for me. So gaming is like that for children. Children, when they play video game, they actually have pure joy. are having fun. And then when we created Alta Learning, we said, what if we can make now learning that fun? ⁓

Rob (27:50)
Absolutely, I can read more. Aldi, we’ve asked you most of the questions at this point. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to close with. Of course, let us know where we can find out more about, you know, all your companies, the work your guys are doing. It’s your time.

Aldi Agaj (28:05)
Well, first of all, want to say thank you to you for the time that you dedicated me today. really appreciate it. you for this podcast. Thank you for actually creating a space for important, I call them important stuff like education, gaming, and so on, scientific research, because this podcast actually can help a lot of people understand what we create and what many little companies like ours, because we’re a small company, are creating around the world. And ⁓ so thank you for that space. ⁓

You can find Alta Learning, just have to Google alter-learning.com. You can find about AAK, just Google us, AAKscience.com. I am available on LinkedIn. I’m forced to be available on LinkedIn. My marketing team wants me to be there. So my operations officers, they both say like, have to have an active relationship with LinkedIn because you have to be available on platforms. I’m the worst on social media, but I am available. ⁓ You can, guys.

Just find me on LinkedIn. My name is Aldi Agai. You can send me a connection request. I reached the maximum. So I’m trying to send email to people, say, hey, because LinkedIn allow you only 30,000 followers, something like that, connections.

You see right now. You can see LinkedIn, but you can send me a message. I swear I’m going to answer. I don’t have somebody who answers for me. We’re looking for people to come and help and create more beautiful games. We’re open to any type of collaboration that can actually bring help to my team. And we actually now are starting an affiliate program. So if you want to know about our games, if you want to know about our technology, if you want to know about who we are as a company,

just reach out to me or any member of my company. Like I said, alter-learning.com, aka telescience.com. They are two companies. We’re based in Davis. You can contact me on LinkedIn. You can follow us on social media. I don’t know, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, you name it. We are almost anywhere right now. But most importantly, talk to us. Like really, we are real people behind. It’s not gonna be a robot.

It’s not going to be an AI talking to you. It’s going to be me. If you contact me on LinkedIn, I’ll say hi. I’ll give you a Zoom meeting contact and then we can talk about that. And if you have good ideas that you maybe didn’t find the right environment to propose your ideas, we’re always open. We are always, always open to new ideas.

Rob (30:40)
Amazing! Thanks again Aldi for joining us today. However Aldi and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey Engagers and thank you for listening to the Professor Game

I guess and since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on School. You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there, join us. It’s a platform called School is for Free and you will find plenty of resources there. We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunity that we might have for you.

And of course, before you go into your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

 

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