 Good morning. I'm Jordan Naftoff, the co-CEO of the Foreign Policy Youth Collaborative Nonprofit. Today, however, I'm speaking to you not as a CEO, but as a 16-year-old high school senior who has grown up in a variety of educational environments. I'd like to talk a little about my personal experiences with gaming, both inside and outside the sphere of education, and how those experiences have shaped me as a student and as a person. My first interaction with online games in a classroom setting was in first grade when we were learning how to touch type. We would spend a couple of hours a week in the school's computer lab playing typing games. These games often had animations to go along with them, cartoon animals dancing or running, stopping or slowing down when you made a mistake, stumbling and hitting obstacles. Their speed and agility would increase as you hit a streak of fluent typing. These games incentivized achievements, often giving you a score and star rating after completing a level, much like beloved apps such as Cut the Rope or Candy Crush. I would play these games for hours and still sometimes do for fun. It was one of the first skills I mastered and has been incredibly useful as every year more and more of our education is online. From writing essays to doing research, the typing games were incredibly influential to my development and I remember them fondly. Even my friends who hated our computer classes enjoyed these games. It brightened everyone's day and left an atmosphere buzzing with excitement as we lined up outside the computer lab. Touch typing is a skill that is almost vital to success, especially in today's digital world. A task that could be menial and dull was made exciting and fun thanks to a few animations. This is a common and effective tactic when teaching young children. Introduce a storyline, bright colors and characters. So why does gaming stop appearing in education after early ages? For the next few years, the only aspect of my education that could be considered gaming was trying to use the smart boards that had been newly installed in our classrooms. At that point, they were constantly glitching. To draw a straight line about a foot long with no interruptions would have been a miracle. Nevertheless, teachers attempted to integrate the malfunctioning smart boards into every lesson for the first couple of months of each new school year before giving up and using them as whiteboards. As far as my own experiences go, no one is using gaming in its traditional sense in education. In our chemistry classes, it's fairly common to complete virtual labs. Online simulators designed to mimic experiments that can be unsafe for a classroom setting or simply too time consuming for the desired outcome. Teachers are hesitant to give students a jar of an acid and a jar of a base and tell them to just go for it. So we use an online simulator to see the effects of mixing the two, often with other mixtures present as well. Virtual labs were usually either really fun or really boring. The boring ones were the ones with very exact instructions, almost as if we were completing a real lab and needed to follow precise instructions for our safety. The fun ones were the ones that took advantage of the fact that the lab was online and posed no real safety risk, allowing us to play around with it. We definitely learned the most when we were given a simulator and free reign to reach a set of objectives and observe reactions to different combinations and ratios. Now, I won't pretend to be an avid gamer. I've dabbled, Sonic and Disney Infinity when I was younger, Mario Kart with Friends, and this year, to my surprise, I had a Destiny 2 phase. My first experience was with Sonic when I was six years old on the computer of a childcare center at our local gym. No one had ever explained the rules to me. I sat down and started pressing random buttons until something happened on the screen, which led to very frustrating sessions of Sonic where I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. There came a point where I was stalled. There was nothing more I could achieve without someone sitting down and explaining the rules to me. At that point, I approached the computers two or three more times before stopping entirely. I lost interest in the game. The same thing happened when I began playing Destiny 2 this year. With a new stadium subscription, I was quickly drawn into the universe of Destiny, customizing a warlock character. I became enamored with the quick rise of my score, leveling up and gaining new weapons and gear. In Destiny 2, there is a soft cap and a hard cap on your score for each season. Once you hit the soft cap, it becomes much harder to raise your score and practically unfeasible for the average player to reach the hard cap. Once I hit the soft cap and advanced about halfway to the hard cap, it became next to impossible to complete the quest that would raise my points without the weapons I would have received as rewards for completing the quest in question. While my score was rising, I was gaining weapons and gear and I stayed motivated. I could see myself improving as a player by the day. As soon as my score became stalled and I stopped getting exciting new gear, I lost motivation. The only way to advance beyond that point was to google different hacks and watch walkthroughs, which takes away from the sense of reward and achievement after finishing quests or fending off enemies. The same thing that had happened with Sonic when I was 6 happened 10 years later with Destiny 2. In short, once there was no indicator that I was, in some way advancing, I lost interest and motivation and abandoned the game. One reason why Destiny 2 was so appealing to me is that games with that level of complexity, another world with its own backstory, often have female characters that are sexualized or don't represent other cultures in a PC way. Destiny had female characters that wore the same gear as the male characters, just as covered and designed to mimic gear that would actually protect rather than embellish the characters' features. While still lacking in its diversity of skin tones, it stayed away from inappropriate representations of other cultures or ethnicities as well. However, Destiny 2 involves mythical species that aren't human, so it's still hard to feel represented in the game by my avatar. The main reason I didn't start playing other games after getting into Destiny 2 was that every time I found one that seemed interesting, the sexualization of female characters prevented me from getting started. If we expand our definition of gaming, I enjoy Sims and I think it's a great example, a large variety of customization for our characters, one of the best ranges of skin tone I've ever seen in a game, and almost entirely custom placement and size of features. In reality, I struggle to think of video games in which I feel I truly have representation. One of my passions is politics and political theory. Like most high school seniors, I'm currently applying to colleges, filling out form after form of information, completing lists of internships and extracurriculars, and writing dozens of essays about myself and my aspirations. As I work through the stage of life, I find myself wondering about the origins of my interest in politics. The first time I clearly remember feeling passionate about political theory was in my US history and government class in eighth grade. My teacher, Mr. Tahiri, was a big fan of incorporating online simulators and games such as Kahoot. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Kahoot. It's essentially a trivia game that factors in speed, accuracy, and the number of correct answers in a row, calculating a score that determines a ranking for each player. It's been a staple in my education since I was in elementary school, and we continue to use it enthusiastically today. In Mr. Tahiri's class, we eagerly awaited our end of unit Kahoot games, the Silicon Valley classroom environment spurring fierce competition. To my surprise and delight, I had a knack for these Kahoot sessions. In my other classes, I was fairly mediocre at Kahoot games, but this subject matter and my ability to retain it as well as my competitive nature practically guaranteed a win in his class. This, of course, made me extremely passionate about US government, a passion that I would later realize I had subconsciously retained. In his class, we also used an online simulator to learn the process that legislation undergoes, specifically the process of a bill becoming a law. Playing the role of a president, you observed the proposed bill bounce back and forth between the House and the Senate, eventually reaching you where you could either sign off or veto the bill. When I think about an ideal new gaming experience designed to inspire youth and political theory, it stems from the simulation we played in eighth grade. This experience would consist of a simulation allowing kids to design their own system of government, borrowing from countries around the world, as well as famous theories by Locke, Burke, Bentham, and more. They would have the opportunity to design a national economy guided by computer-generated characters and compose bills and legislation, watching it travel through their governmental systems and see the impact it has on their general population. In political theory classes, it's very easy to look at historical shortcomings in political systems around the world and believe that you have a simple solution. In fact, it's human nature. However, so many complexities exist that make political theory an intricate and often unpredictable art when being applied. The new game I'm proposing would be specifically designed to help kids understand these intricacies and learn to think both about the details and the big picture of politics. It would lead them away from black and white thinking in politics, learning to think dialectically. The game would have options to play out four years in about 20 minutes or, alternatively, one hour, customizing your experience to either a quick simulation or a more detailed game. If I had had the chance to experience this hypothetical simulator, I would have become invested in politics and realized that it's what I want to pursue much sooner. When I think of the future of learning, I think of a learning environment that can be customized to the individual students' needs. When I was little, I used to go to a French international school in Texas, and I was extremely lucky to naturally learn well in that environment. The methods used to break down complex math problems provide background for each method used and prove why those methods work were perfect for my learning style, but not all of my friends were so lucky. Some of my closest friends who were incredibly intelligent ran into roadblocks when trying to absorb the information during our math classes, often getting low scores on math tests. Their frustration grew by the week and they were scolded by teachers, regarded as less gifted, and expectations for their success were lowered. Most teachers wouldn't take the time to sit down with them and figure out how they learned, leading to detrimental gaps in their learning. I moved to Silicon Valley when I was 10, and I was thrown into a drastically different learning environment which left huge gaps in the math and science I learned in 5th grade, my first year in California. I was suddenly forced to use new methods to solve math problems instead of being allowed to use the ones that I had already learned that made sense to me. My teachers simply glanced over my papers and declared that they didn't understand the method, so I had to use theirs, without ever taking the time to ask me to explain my work to them. It was extremely frustrating and stalled my learning for a year. For my junior year, I was in an early college program which allowed me to study on a college campus full-time to acquire my high school graduation credits. The minimal interference by professors and general attitude that it was up to the student to find ways to absorb the lectures and complete the work allowed students to use their own strengths to work, and almost all the students in the program saw a great difference from how they were expected to succeed back at their home high schools. Students shouldn't have to rely on personal tutors in order to be taught in a way that makes sense to them and allows them to succeed. The learning experience should be customizable and adjust to an individual's learning style with modules for visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. This is becoming a more realistic goal by the day as we see advancements in technology and gaming. From touch typing to chemistry simulators, technology is fairly integrated into our learning experience, but gaming is rarely used after first or second grade, which happens to be around the time that students begin to lose interest in school and declare that they hate it. In gaming, as long as success is being incentivized, whether that be through progressing in levels or a score that increases, players will stay engaged and continue to strive for success. When looking back at my experience in schools, to me, the future of learning is one in which every student has a more customizable education which sets them on a path to success by using their strengths and weaknesses. Thank you.