Rob Alvarez Bucholska
0

Bram Wulteputte Gamifies Education With Minecraft and NASA | Episode 393

 

🔥 Losing users? Get free, expert-backed resources to boost retention with gamification: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web

How do you gamify learning without losing the learning?
We talk with Bram about designing Minecraft-powered learning experiences that actually work. From working with NASA to teaching democracy through play, he reveals how chunking content, building tutorials, and collaborating with subject matter experts creates game-based learning that sticks.

Bram Wulteputte is a Co-founder and the Head of Education at Shapescape, a company merging education with the immersive world of Minecraft. With years of experience in games and gamification, Bram has built educational experiences that don’t just engage—they inspire. Through Shapescape’s partnership with Minecraft Education, he’s been shaping unique content that bridges fun and learning, resonating with audiences around the globe. From guiding strategy to developing immersive curriculums, Bram has hands-on insights into how gamification can unlock new dimensions in both education and business.

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: shapescape.com/education
LinkedIn: Bram Wulteputte
X/Twitter: @BramWulteputte

 

Links to episode mentions:

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Bram Wulteputte (00:00)
We’ve done a project with NASA for the Artemis project. But the first part of the experience was very driven by the subject matter experts that wanted to dive into the theory and what we see in the practice is that kids open those dialogue boxes and click next, next, next, next, next, next, next. They’ve actually missed a lot of the information that would be very useful to them.

Rob (00:22)
Hey Engagers, this is Professor Game, where as you know, we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and retention. I’m Rob, I’m a consultant, I’m a coach and the founder of the Professor Game, not only the podcast, but also as a coaching and business in general. And I teach at IU Business School, EBS University, EFMD and many other places around the world. And before we dive into this interview, if you’re struggling with retention…

and churn in your business and are looking to find out how to make your users stick around. You’ll find our free resources useful. You can find them for free in the links in the description. And today to talk about that and much, much more, have Bram Vultepute. Is that kind of not terrible?

Bram Wulteputte (01:12)
That’s about good, yeah.

Rob (01:15)
We do need to know, are you prepared to engage, Bram?

Bram Wulteputte (01:19)
Absolutely. Let’s do it.

Rob (01:21)
You are, as you know, Bram is a co-founder and head of education at ShapeScape. It is a company merging education with the immersive world of Minecraft. He has years of experience in games and gamification, and he has built educational experiences that don’t just engage, they actually inspire. Through ShapeScape’s partnership with Minecraft Education, he’s been shaping unique content that bridges fun and learning, resonating with audiences around the globe.

And from guiding strategy to developing immersive curriculums, has, Bram has hands on insights into how gamification can lock new dimensions in both education and of course, business. Bram, is that fair? Is there anything that we’re missing? I think you want to add from that, that we should know.

Bram Wulteputte (02:08)
No, I think that’s a pretty ⁓ comprehensive description of what I do. So let’s roll with that.

Rob (02:15)
Let’s go. So Bram, what would if we were to, I don’t know, shadow you for a day, week, whatever, what would that look like? What would that feel like? What are the kinds of things you are doing in your life nowadays?

Bram Wulteputte (02:27)
Well, if it was last week, it’d be redecorating my office, but I don’t think that that’s a typical week in my life. I think it will be a lot of ⁓ project management work, talking to clients about future projects or doing analysis of existing projects that we do with microfibre education. ⁓ But it’s a lot of calls with very interesting people. That’s the majority of my days.

Rob (02:56)
Lots of calls with interesting people sounds a little bit like what we do in the podcast. It’s just that for me it’s once a week ish. Depends on the week for sure. So Bram, we like to dive in with difficulties as well because I do think and we’ve seen how failure, fail or first attempts at learning however we want to call them. They bring a lot of lessons that we can learn from. So the more we can be there with you and feel that pain, I think the better we will be able to take out some of those.

difficulties and the experiences you got from that. So is there a story you can tell us about one of those moments and some of the key lessons you got?

Bram Wulteputte (03:33)
Yeah, I thought about this question because you asked this question on every episode. ⁓ my bad. I hit the microphone. I think what we do with Microfidication is we try and teach a lot of kids at the same time in a lot of different languages, ⁓ very complex topics and try to break them down and simplify them and make the content into a game. ⁓

We very often work with subject matter experts that are rooted in traditional education, that ⁓ work very hard on the textbooks. It’s how it’s always been done. It’s how it’s always worked with a R &D. Yeah, that hasn’t always worked. But the world has considered it to be working.

Rob (04:21)
worked or whatever that means, right?

Bram Wulteputte (04:32)
But when translating that sort of content into games, ⁓ very often we work with experts that really want to bring in a lot of dialogue. And for example, we’ve done a project with NASA for ⁓ the Artemis project. That was a game around why are we going back to the moon? Why is humanity planning on going back to the moon? Super interesting topic. ⁓

turn into the game about how rockets work and just actual rocket science and simplifying that down. But during the production of that, there was a little bit of conservatism in the form of the education where there was a lot of discussion about, okay, we want to explain a lot of stuff instead of gamifying it, which really defeated the platform. And it’s actually one of those projects where I’m not

entirely happy with the end result, because there is so much explanation going on. There’s so much dialogue. And we do end up having a great gamification in the second part of the experience where people get to build their own rockets and test whether or not they will work and get to decorate their rockets because it’s Minecraft and people want to do crazy stuff with their rockets and it’s all possible. ⁓

But the first part of the experience was very driven by the subject matter experts that want to dive into the theory. And what we see in the practice is that then kids open those dialogue boxes and click next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next to get to the game and then play that. And they’ve actually missed a lot of the information that would be very useful to them. But I think that that’s a failure on our end to not bring that in.

a more engaging way.

Rob (06:30)
Graham, if you were to start over again on that project or a similar project or with similar people, I don’t know, whatever you want to go for, is there something you would do different? And if so, what and how would that be different?

Bram Wulteputte (06:44)
First of all, would split up all of those super heavy dialogues and all the text-based learning into really small chunks, then have a little bit of that, then put in a game element, like a little mini game to solidify that knowledge straight away ⁓ instead of now what we’ve done with first.

bring a big block of dialogue and then a big block of game doesn’t really work. And that’s also something that we’ve done in the project after that, where if you chunk it up a little bit more, people will actually read the dialogue. It will sink in and they get to act on it straight away and have fun.

Rob (07:33)
So, Bram, that sounds like a significant pain, you know, it’s not something that it’s because you want it to do it that way. And it sounds like a clever way to work around it because it is true that sometimes you’re working with people who want something very specific and they’re one thing. And it’s not a question of, I don’t take this project because you want to work that way. It is a clever way of saying, well, let’s actually do it the way you want it. You have all that text. Let’s just, we have to do it in a different.

manner. And that’s that’s a clever way of definitely getting out of it. Engagers, as you see, there’s always, there’s always a solution. There’s always something else that you can do. just like in games and you see things and it’s like, I could tell the story. Well, how about a cinematic thing? And I do it different, or how about I let you find some cool, like there are ways to do this and games give us a lot of inspiration on that. like, well, I’m learning a game, right? If you’re going to learn the game for the first time, they don’t give you an.

I am a weird person. am aware that I’m wearing a Nintendo shirt right now. And I’m saying this because I back in the day with Ness, the first Nintendo, it brought booklets. I was one of the weird kids who actually read the booklets. I mean, nowadays they don’t even give you the booklet, like because it’s pointless. Nobody except weird kiddos like me is reading the booklets anyway. So why not just integrate that into the game and give you instead of giving you all the mechanics at once, it slowly gives you

access different things. again, it’s one other way of doing that kind of stuff. And Bram, actually, how about we go for a big success, something that you’re proud of. We would like to be there with you also feel that success, that pride that you feel in that project and see if there are any success factors that you can name from that experience.

Bram Wulteputte (09:20)
yeah, absolutely. think our, our most recent recent projects, perhaps one, ⁓ to talk about, ⁓ it’s actually, if you’re watching the video version of this, there’s a little print above me. ⁓ it’s a print of St. Peter’s Basilica. ⁓ we very recently did a project with my education around AI for cultural heritage through Minecraft, ⁓ where, ⁓ people can

visit a digital recreation of ⁓ the St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and actually learn about the Basilica’s history because it stretches back ⁓ a long time ⁓ and uses ⁓ AI assisted tools to see how it looked back in the past ⁓ and sort of re-envision historical figures, talk with them, also restore parts of the Basilica because it is about cultural heritage.

⁓ and, and how AI can be helped, can help to preserve, ⁓ cultural heritage. think that’s, using Minecraft to teach about the Vatican was definitely not something on my bingo card. ⁓ when I started my career, ⁓ but here we are, I think, it’s been an amazing experience working with them.

Rob (10:43)
How’s he I’m very curious now about like what’s the integration of AI look like what are the kinds of things that AI is doing in project like this

Bram Wulteputte (10:50)
So AI was used, first of all, the real Basilica was scanned by a company called Iconim. ⁓ They used drones and I think 60,000 pictures of the Basilica to create a 3D model of the place. And then they used AI assisted cloud computing to format it into that 3D model. We’ve then used that 3D model to bring it into the game.

And then we’ve used various ⁓ AI-assisted tools to bring in extra content, such as a Microsoft designer, a Microsoft co-pilot to bring dialogues or find extra resources that couldn’t be found through a regular search.

Rob (11:40)
Nice interesting. It’s a good way of starting to integrate these tools that we have now with

Bram Wulteputte (11:46)
They’re

all like assisted tools. think in development, that’s really important that if you’re using AI in development, they’re assisting designers, creators instead of taking over. I think that that’s really important in a creative industry that they’re here to help not to give a final product.

Rob (12:07)
and people notice as well. It’s noticeable when that’s the case. Bram, you’ve worked on many projects, you’ve done many things, you’ve been doing this specifically in Minecraft for a while. Do you have some form of a process? Say the Vatican came to you again or some other religion or some other project comes in. Do you have a series of steps or what do you do? If somebody comes in with a project, what are the things you would be expecting to do in the next few months?

Bram Wulteputte (12:36)
So first of all, we need to really deep dive into what learning objectives they have, what they want to teach to kids, if it is kids, because sometimes we have projects that teach to adults as well. ⁓ But our largest set of audience, because we work with Minecraft, is kids. So we first figure out, what is exactly the knowledge that we want to transfer? And then we figure out the best gamification methods to do that.

Is that through competitive online multiplayer? Is that a single player experience? Something story driven? Is replayability a big factor? Is it a one and done? So first of all, it’s a lot of calling with this client. And that’s why I have these chats with interesting people for multiple times a week.

because that’s what we’ve got to figure out. think that’s starter product that’s super important. And then, yeah, we start producing. ⁓ That’s not as much me, but we start looking at how does the area look like that we need to games to take place in? How long does the experience need to be? These are all collaborative problems that we need to solve together with whoever is our client. And very often, it’s…

Yeah, like I said, it’s collaboration. And we just advise on our best practices.

Rob (14:10)
Amazing. It sounds great. And from that experience that you’ve had, from all of the projects you’ve built, is there something that you would say is, well, if you incorporate this into your process, or if you do this when you’re working on a project, it’s not a silver bullet, but it’s definitely going to help you at least make the project a little bit better. Best practice, perhaps.

Bram Wulteputte (14:32)
⁓ Probably a tutorial. It’s super basic thing, but we’ve sometimes found projects where, okay, ⁓ we’re aiming at ⁓ activating schools or cultural institutions. So there would be a computer with Minecraft inside of a museum or whatever. And people could walk up to that computer and start playing that Minecraft experience locally. What we found is that

Even though Minecraft is the most popular game of all time, not everyone knows how to play it and people might not know how to move or look around or use certain items. So putting a tutorial for Minecraft at the start of a Minecraft experience, that is definitely something that we’re now just always pushing for like, no, no, no, that will help a lot because otherwise you’re just going to have maybe 30 % of your audience not go past the first minute.

because they don’t get it.

Rob (15:32)
literally

churning out just because they don’t know what to do. feel… Youkai likes to say that people like to feel smart, right? Exactly. if you do something and you try to do it and you can’t, you feel the opposite of smart. I don’t want to say stupid, but kind of.

Bram Wulteputte (15:46)
They’re just like, they don’t get it. They don’t know what to do. Okay, maybe this is not for me. they move on. Whereas the first couple minutes of any gamified experience, I think it’s super crucial to get people invested into the activity that they’ve started with because they’ve made the decision. Okay, I want to try this. But if the first minute has them confused on how to proceed, they’ll just turn out and you’ve kind of

lost that opportunity with that person.

Rob (16:18)
Absolutely makes a lot of sense and talking about recommendations. That’s a great one How about somebody is there somebody that comes to your mind? Like I know we kind of chatted about this But if you if you were to hear someone, know alive or not and not it not anymore among us That you would like to hear is there somebody that comes to mind answering these questions and again think AI nowadays can even Create people who have you know have a lot of written work or even you know at this point even videos as well

Bram Wulteputte (16:48)
I’m actually going to, going to say within my industry and recommend that you talk to, ⁓ Justin Edwards, who’s the head of, learning experiences that Microsoft education, ⁓ who is basically giving us a lot of work. ⁓ but, ⁓ he has incredible insights on, ⁓ actually applying games inside of education. ⁓ probably a lot more than me. I do.

Rob (16:49)
⁓

Bram Wulteputte (17:18)
Maybe five or six projects a year. does 20, 25. So he brings in a lot of experience inside of the educational system as well. And how games can really drive deep impact there as well with AI. He’s a massive ⁓ proponent of AI as well. So good to have a conversation with him.

Rob (17:42)
Sounds amazing, sounds amazing and keeping up with those recommendations, how about a book?

Bram Wulteputte (17:47)
Ooh, books, books. I’m actually on a challenge this year to read 25 books. I think I might have some… ⁓ It might not be the most… Well, I don’t know. I think… Has anyone suggested The Anxious Generation before? Okay, it’s a book about how…

Rob (18:11)
I so.

Bram Wulteputte (18:17)
The current youth with social media is living up in a world that is very different to however people like millennials and above have grown up in. There’s a lot more social pressure. The world is a completely different place. I think it’s a super interesting read.

Rob (18:42)
The world is definitely a different place nowadays. The anxious generation sounds like an interesting one. Bram, if I were to ask you about your favorite or not your favorite actually, your superpower, that thing that you are able to do at least better than most people, it doesn’t have to be absolutely everyone. You know, remember flying is a superpower many have or super strength is something that many have. What would that be?

Bram Wulteputte (19:10)
⁓ that’s an insanely difficult one.

I think it would be figuring out what people want in their projects. So if we’re talking to a client, figuring out what they want deep down instead of all of the fluff that goes around it and really driving into the why they’re trying to do this project and then working with that. Because a lot of people that I talked to, the first conversation that you have, you have a lot of…

talking points, objectives, but really digging deep into, but why does your organization want to this? Why do you want to do this? I think that is something that I’ve been pretty good at in the past couple of years.

Rob (20:05)
Definitely sounds like something that is very useful when I’m talking to people and they are starting in this world or I’m coaching them to get something. The first thing that we have to get through is really what it is that you want. And that first answer oftentimes that, I want people to have fun is so superficial and there’s so many layers underneath that, right? And actually getting to that place is difficult and it’s difficult. It’s work.

Bram Wulteputte (20:29)
If you want another book recommendation, start with Why from Szymon Sinek and it will help you out with that a lot.

Rob (20:40)
sure that will be a definitely a good book, Simon Sinek is definitely very good as well. And Bram, get to a difficult question. I think it’s the first and only one probably. What would you say is a your favorite game?

Bram Wulteputte (20:53)
For me personally to play, it’s probably Overwatch 2. But I think to work with it, it’s Minecraft. ⁓ I work with games every day and Minecraft is definitely the big one there. But if I have to play or if I play a game in my spare time, it’ll be Overwatch or ⁓ maybe a battlefield. the majority of my time definitely goes to Overwatch.

The past couple of years have been rough in the development of that, but they’ve sort of turned things around and it’s been really enjoyable.

Rob (21:34)
Fantastic, Brian, we do have a few spare minutes so we can actually dive into our random question from the audience. What is coming up this time is, is there something that you think that gamification could never help achieve? If you want to dive even deeper in your work in particular, you can think of Minecraft in particular, but if you want to go wide, you can definitely go with gamification as well.

Bram Wulteputte (22:04)
Honestly, not that I can think of because every time that I’m faced with a problem, think there are ways that gamification or games can solve those problems. I’m now trying to just think of problems that could not be solved with gamification and I can’t think of any. Can you?

Rob (22:30)
It’s always I mean for what when when people ask me like this I like this question because it’s something that people ask often Is there something you can’t solve with this and it’s always the question is is not if it can’t be solved The question is what are you solving for? If you’re solving like if the problem is the platform is broken like it’s a tech error Like you can’t solve it with game fiction. The platform is broken. It’s not gonna be unbroken by making it more engaging. In fact

If it’s broken and too many users break the platform, making it more engaging will break even further, right? If you’re solving the right kind of problems, so you’re solving for engagement, for retention, for loyalty, for motivation, for behavior change, something was in that realm or very, very close to it. I do think that gamification can solve pretty much anything in that realm. Now, if you’re trying to solve something completely different, like

or things like access to education. I always talk about this because I come from Venezuela, right? So Latin America, the problems in education there, yes, we still have the engagement problems and all this, but a bigger, broader issue is access to education. There’s a lot of people who don’t like literally live in a place where there is no school for you to go to. And, know, public transport is horrible. And so people don’t really have a chance to get to study. Building schools is a thing. Gamifying

the building of the school doesn’t make sense. Maybe if you’re fundraising, you want to get engagement from people. Maybe there’s where you can bring in gamification. But that’s just another example of things where gamification is not the solution, I would say. But it’s because you’re solving for a different kind of problem, if you know what I mean.

Bram Wulteputte (24:15)
Yeah, I think that is a challenge. And I think lack of means can be a ⁓ well, a difficult element. But yeah, I think you’re right.

Rob (24:33)
But that’s basically it. It’s if you’re in the right realm of trying to get engagement and all of that, there is a solution. I’m not saying it’s easy. I was approached by a people I worked with in my past life, so to speak, who were looking to engage people to go and vote for elections again when I lived back home in Venezuela. That is a

big, sticky, hairy challenge, especially for youth and especially in countries where, like my country, people seriously, not only feel, but well, eventually, I’m not gonna get into politics too much on this one, but you know, their vote literally did not count. Like people voted for a majority for something and that something was not respected. So getting people to vote, even before this happened, it was already a challenge. It was a huge challenge, huge, humongous, right? Maybe you couldn’t solve all of it at once, but you could make it better.

Like there were things that could be done and that they started to hint at doing as well, forgetting that, of course, you do require resources, you do require time. Like there’s all of these restraints and constraints that you can have. I do think it went on the right path of thinking it through the lens or even thinking about it. Like, ⁓ it’s not about how do I get people to have the possibility to vote, which is already a challenge in and of itself. But how do I convince people who can vote, right? Or can register for voting?

to actually commit that action. Like what, how can I entice them, motivate them, engage them into something like this? ⁓

Bram Wulteputte (26:06)
That’s actually a challenge that ⁓ last year we were faced with a project around democracy and how does a representative democracy work? Why should you go out and vote? Why does it matter? And we actually got to work on that with a foundation in Belgium to make a game around

Well, people could make their own political parties within a small group ⁓ and then deal with other groups, find compromises and sort of play out the political process. Because I think a big issue within democracy is that there is a big misunderstanding of how politics works and that it is a collaborative process. ⁓ In most countries in the world.

I think multiple parties have to work together to find a good path forward. And also there’s so many different viewpoints in life and people do have to move forward together. That collaboration sometimes gets lost and people only see their own point of view and want to move forward. having a game that can help people understand each other better and find out that this

is a collaborative process, this democracy. It is not a one party rule. Although it is somewhere in some places in the world, collaboration is always better and gamifying that really helps.

Rob (27:50)
It definitely does. So Bram, now we are finally towards the end of the interview. Finally. I don’t even know why that came out. But is there any final words that you want to say? Anything we didn’t ask you or anything of the sort? Of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, your work or any call to actions you might have before we say it’s game over.

Bram Wulteputte (28:12)
first of all, I just want to say thank you for the invite. ⁓ we were talking for a few months already on, ⁓ on doing this and it’s very fun to finally be on here. ⁓ I think what I would still want to say is that, ⁓ learning, ⁓ I’ve seen some comments online. I don’t know why I let them get to me their comments online, but, ⁓ about learning doesn’t need to be fun. Like learning should just happen. It’s happened the way.

It has always done, but why not make it fun? Why not make it engaging? Why not have people learn without realizing that they’re learning ⁓ because they love what they’re doing. I think that is something I would love for ⁓ the world to change into where people could just enjoy it, enjoy education, that a lot more people stay engaged because I think that’s one of the big problems of the world is that

People get disengaged with education. They drop out. And just think about all the lost value of people just dropping out of education because they don’t feel engaged. That’s something I would like to work on. Where people can find out more about Shapescape, that’s super easy. Shapescape.com. You can find all of our stuff there. And for me, I think I’m most active on LinkedIn these days. ⁓

Find me on LinkedIn on Bram Woldteputte and yeah, connect with me there.

Rob (29:47)
Absolutely, So, Engagers, Bram, thank you very much for making it this far. If you’ve been into the interview, I know sometimes it is a bit longer than the typical content. But I do think there is a lot to be said in this topic. And I think all the answers to these questions from experts, people in the field like Bram, bring us a lot of value. So thanks again, Bram, for being here.

for sharing your experience, your knowledge, your understanding on all of these topics. However, Braham 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 Podcast. 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 and 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 opportunities 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 next episode of Professor Game. See you there!

 

End of transcription