Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
From Arcades to Education: Brent Bushnell of Two Bit Circus on a STEAM-Powered Learning Revolution
Brent Bushnell is an entrepreneur and engineer focused on experiences for entertainment and learning. He's the founder of Two Bit Circus, a live entertainment company that builds and exhibits all-ages, social attractions. He’s chairman of the non-profit Two Bit Foundation which uses games and play to inspire students about invention. Brent is a Sir Edmund Hillary Fellow, a supporter of Clowns Without Borders and publishes on social media @brentbushnell.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Brent’s journey from arcade builder to education innovator unfolded.
- The origin and impact of the STEAM Carnival and how it helped reframe STEM learning through art and play.
- Why clean waste is a powerful, untapped resource for hands-on learning in schools.
- How DIY arcade cabinets are empowering students to learn CAD, electronics, business—and earn income.
- The exciting future of immersive learning with escape rooms, virtual reality, and AI-guided experiences.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:33] How a viral OK Go music video accidentally sparked an education movement
[00:04:49] “STEAM not STEM”: Why art is essential to innovation
[00:08:45] Inside the Two Bit Foundation’s clean waste model and its success in LAUSD
[00:13:10] The Open Source Arcade Project: A full-spectrum STEAM learning experience
[00:21:26] The evolution of the maker and open-source movements
[00:27:58] How AI can bridge the gap for students lacking tech or coding skills
[00:34:25] New venue in Santa Monica: Turning entertainment spaces into learning spaces
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Brent Bushnell: As tech got more accessible and people found each other online, the maker movement exploded with places for people to be able to create and ways for people to be able to create. And then as the tools got better and cheaper and more capable, the kinds of things people could make got more awesome. You know?
And all of a sudden you're making your own self-driving car, you know? Or your own crazy monster robot like that is. Shocking. If you could've told me as a little kid that I could make a robot with all of my own solutions inside it, I mean, that's just really magical.
[00:00:36] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry funding rounds to impact AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at Ed
[00:00:51] Ben Kornell: Tech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to. A pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:16] Alex Sarlin: Brett Bushnell is an entrepreneur and engineer focused on experiences for entertainment and learning. He's the founder of Tuit Circus. A live entertainment company that builds and exhibits all ages social attractions. He's chairman of the Nonprofit Two Bit Foundation, which uses games and play to inspire students about invention.
Brent is a Sir Edmund Hillary Fellow, a supporter of Clowns Without Borders, and publishes on social media at Brent Bushnell. Brent Bushnell, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks, Alex. So
[00:01:48] Brent Bushnell: psyched to be here.
[00:01:49] Alex Sarlin: I am really excited to talk to you. So you are the founder of Two Bit Circus. You have created a DIY arcade.
You think about Maker Spaces, you think about schools. You've done so much interesting work in the education and gaming space. Let's start with just how you got into this world. What is your background? What have you been doing with Two Bit Circus? It's such an incredible and unique place.
[00:02:13] Brent Bushnell: Wow, thanks. It's really been a, you know, at this point, like a 15 year saga.
So it's really one of our past employees was talking to a different past employee and they were like, what season were you a part of? You know? 'cause we were a consultancy for brands for years and then we had our own traveling carnival and now, you know, we had a 50,000 square foot permanent facility in downtown LA and now we've got a popup in Santa Monica.
So it's definitely been a lot of different. Things. Yeah. And the core has always been about social play. You know, getting people together, whether we're bringing, you know, our attractions to other people's events. You know, we did huge things for Amazon and the Super Bowl and whatever, or, you know, bringing stuff to our own events, curating other creators.
You know, there's all sorts of other great game makers and indie developers out there. And you know, my background's engineering, computer science and, and electrical engineering. But I've been an entrepreneur my whole adult life. And this sort of interesting thing happened as my co-founder Eric Gradman and I were, you know, just started building this stuff for fun.
You know, we were just building rooms of laser beams and walls of buttons we could take to people's parties and, you know, and then the parties just kept getting bigger. But the thing in the sort of agency phase ended up helping, okay, go make a big Rube Goldberg machine music. Video. This was sort of like early days of viral videos, you know, and they had really cracked a nut, you know, with their sort of dancing on the treadmill routine.
I
[00:03:32] Alex Sarlin: remember that. Yeah.
[00:03:33] Brent Bushnell: And so we helped with their, basically their next big video after that treadmill one. And it was this giant Rube Goldberg, you know, which are the sort of things where a ball rolls in a ramp and hits a cat, and the cat pops a balloon. Well, so. This thing was all done in one shot. It was this ginormous warehouse of all sorts of crazy stuff.
You know, we got all of our nerd friends together and everybody built different parts of it, and my childhood Legos ended up in this thing. Yeah. You know, there was a little Lego car and so we build this thing and it goes super viral and all of a sudden we're getting all this inbound. Content from teachers and they're like, Hey, thanks so much for that video.
This has been really useful in our physics class, we made our own Rube Goldbergs. Here's the video. You know? And we had like sort of accidentally stumbled on this like learning tool. And that really started something in me. You know, I come from a big family, I've always had a lot of younger siblings, and so I really love the process of learning just in general.
But to see that, you know, here we were. Making games, you know, games are fun, people like games and kids like games and viral videos and fun stuff like that. And to sort of start with the fun and start with the interest and the enthusiasm, you get this sort of great pathway to say, oh, by the way, you just learned something.
And so we really doubled down on learning programs and we actually sort of helped, I think, of us sort of having helped launch the term steam,
[00:04:48] Alex Sarlin: you know, for STEM
[00:04:49] Brent Bushnell: plus art. But we launched a Steam carnival as a Kickstarter, and I spent. Two years sort of educating everybody on, hey, it's, it's not just stem, you know, I'm a STEM nerd, we're a bunch of STEM nerds, but the art, you know, is what brings the fun and the joy and the creativity and the, you know, all the, it was sort of the term was incomplete, you know?
And so we launched the Steam Carnival and it was like one half all these high tech attractions we'd made, and then one half a bunch of hands-on projects where kids could learn how to make that stuff and are sort of. Message was like, Hey, we made this stuff. It's not that hard. You can too. And after touring the carnival for a couple of years, you know, I mean 120,000 square feet of stuff, I mean, that is two football fields.
And so just imagine moving that around. It is as hard as you can imagine. So we decided to go permanent, and when we decided to go permanent, we split the company in two. And this was really a response to. The carnival got a lot of interest in enthusiasm. You know, people liked the concept of STEM and steam, and the buckets of interest sort of fell into two.
As we were going out and trying to fundraise for it, sponsorship and the grants and whatnot, we saw that there was sort of two groups that cared about different things, and they had different metrics. They cared about, everything was different, and there was the like. Marketing group who cared about like how many people were coming through and they wanted to promote to that audience and who were they?
And you know, they had their metrics and then there was the learning group. It's like, oh, what students are you bringing down and what's their backgrounds and what's the learning objectives? And these things were different and they were enough different that we were like, these need to be two different enterprises.
And so we ended up launching Two Bit Foundation 5 0 1 C3 that has since acquired four other nonprofits. Really? Which is which? Amazing. I didn't know you could do that, but you know, but there really, there's frankly too many nonprofits, so a lot of people with an inspired idea go out and they create a nonprofit, and what ends up happening is whoever that inspired person was.
Maybe runs outta gas in five or 10 years. And at that point, they've got some amount of places that they're effectuating their programs, some amount of funding streams and some levels of board members that are engaged or not. And what we found was, as we saw other interesting nonprofits that were doing.
Cool inspired approaches to learning that were in those various stages. We started putting them together and as a result, we're now in a quarter of the L-A-U-S-D school system. It's really, you know, it's second biggest in the country. Oh yeah. So it's just real ginormous operation and it's really four parts.
And this is, you know, one of the things I was excited to talk with you about, because I actually think this model belongs in every state. Union, you know, and for, and could work in every major metropolitan and is an engine that has some self-sustaining nature to it, unlike normal nonprofits that are always out raising grant money.
And so what we do is we collect clean waste. And so this is. You know, a nail polish company changes their bottle format. They have two pallets of the old bottles empty and clean on the loading dock, right? And those are just gonna be shoveled into a landfill. You know, the, the amazing one is freaking urine sample cups.
These things expire. Their sterility expire, so they've never been used. They're perfectly clean. They shovel them by the truckload into the landfills because you know it's cheaper than just get new ones than re-sterilized them. And so that kind of stuff, we collect tons and tons of different things, extra fabric, remnants, extra packaging and all that stuff becomes art supplies for the kids.
They use that in their projects. And these are the sort of consumable materials that you don't get back from a project. So we have all those consumables, we've got the makerspaces, we deploy physical benches of tools and all the sort of things that you do get back from projects. They can be shared between the kids and then opened up the Steam Carnival approach to communities.
So now schools can run their own. And you know, I mean the foundation has run so many more carnivals than we ever hosted in the early days, but it's amazing as far flung as Australia and Texas and you know, we've really gone all over with that. And then professional development. So we're training the teachers.
Any, you know, how to incorporate steam into your curriculum, whether it's English or history or you know, science and math. And so one of the things I think from a model standpoint that could work everywhere is the affluent neighborhoods will buy the subscription to the clean waste. You know, they will pay monthly for that.
And then that allows you to, you know, have fee for service. And when you go to grant makers and you say, Hey. Half of our budget comes from this fee for service work that we're doing, you know, and they're like, wow, you guys are a self-sustaining operation. And so it really gets you better access to grants and foundations, but is also, you don't have your handout all the time.
The program itself can sort of be self-sustaining. And I just really, every place that has manufacturing has clean waste like this. And so I would just love to see this model all over.
[00:09:20] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, a hundred percent. And you know, one thing that strikes me, hearing how you sort of got into this world, so many people.
In education and in ed tech start from the education world. They are teachers in a classroom. They are education entrepreneurs in various ways, and then they sort of realize, hey, technology is a way to scale, or gaming is a way to build engagement. And they sort of move into that space. You came the opposite way and I don't think that many people came the opposite way.
No, just very few sort of come from the fun. Arcade Playspace, you calling it Steam, but before it was Steam, it was just, you know, Makerspace like, let's put things together, let's build, let's engage, let's create new things, and use games as a way to get people in the door, to excite them, to have them collaborate.
You know, education was not your goal at all when you started. And then as you say, with this video, with a okay, go video and with the whole journey. You sort of came into the education space, but the way you talk about it, you clearly understand it very well. You've cracked the district code. That's really hard for a lot of people.
You do professional development. That's really hard for a lot of people. So I guess my question is for people who come the other way, which is again, almost everybody, what would you recommend they try to understand about the gaming and engagement and fun part so that they don't sort of. Make mistakes well so that they understand what actually works and what might take a lot of time and energy and money, but not actually engage students or not actually sort of bring that joy to the learning experience.
When
[00:10:47] Brent Bushnell: I think back
[00:10:47] Alex Sarlin: to
[00:10:47] Brent Bushnell: the most impactful learning experience I had as a kid, it was my junior year physics class with Mr. Wisdom. Tom Wisdom, and he had us. Spend the entire semester on one project and we had, and for that project we solved a safety problem and we got to pick the problem and imagine for solutions and build a prototype and build a marketing materials and do a patent search.
And. It was so real because it was real. We were really solving a real problem and building a real thing, you know? Yes. And I feel like so often learning is in this void, disconnected from reality, disconnected from the way real life happens, and to think that I could graduate high school with a patented.
Invention, you know, talk about a cool thing for your resume. Amazing. Yeah, so, so much of my approach stems from that, you know, as I really feel like a project that you can sink your teeth into and take it from start to finish, and by the time you're done, there's a thing right here. And that is really inspiring and empowering, and the tools to be able to make stuff have just gotten better.
I mean, when Eric and I first started collaborating, you know, the Arduino. Unlocked microcontrollers and sensors in a way that was really hard. Before that, I mean, it was like cross compiling and all these things that just hadn't been really well solved for the learning community. And then all of a sudden that stuff just got so accessible.
Unity and open source and all these different things that kind of allow an inspired person to like. Make a robot that auto drives around and does combat with other robots. I mean, it's just like so cool. It's so cool. And so that's the other piece is can the project be something the kid will be excited about that they want it to exist?
Because you will just mow down problems if you're inspired. So how to get things that inspire that level of dedication. And that was really how we landed at this arcade project is, you know, this thing. Outta the two bit foundation. One of the ones that we merged with was imagination.org, which is, if you saw the Kane's arcade video with Kane Monroy built this incredible cardboard arcade, you know, and, and NAND mulch this, an incredible filmmaker drives by.
It was an auto parts store. The kid had all these access to all these boxes. So NAND goes and sees this. The Hardboard arcade, he's there to buy a handle for his car, sees this incredible kid building this incredible arcade, and he makes a video about it and it goes super viral. And so across the world, the cardboard challenge, kids are making all sorts of cool stuff outta cardboard.
Well, what I saw at our carnivals was you'd have these great cardboard games, you know, pinball and ski ball, and all these different things, and they'd last until about noon. You know, because cardboard is flimsy. Right. You know, it's really cool 'cause you can cut it and it's somewhat structural and so you can kind of make some things but you can't really use it for very long.
And one of the things I really loved about our carnival was for a kid rather than a science fair, which can kind of be boring and the community could maybe find it boring. A carnival that's fricking fun. Right. You know, bring your friends, bring your family. And so how to get stuff that the community would really feel like it was fun.
And that was where we landed as arcade was, is open source. Every aspect of building an arcade cabinet. And by doing that you cover cad, CNC, router, table, electronics, operating systems, programming, art payments, cloud services. And so it was like it really covered, it had a real nice broad spectrum of stuff and the baseline that we're open sourcing is a baseline.
Good thing. An existence, proof of an arcade. But an inspired kid could say, wow, I love that. It's got the monitor and the two joysticks and whatever else been set of joysticks. I want up to have a steering wheel, you know, and there's five great open source driving games out there. So they could grab one of those and do the slight modifications that we need for the billing, and all of a sudden they're up and running.
So what the project is is a CAD file courtesy of SolidWorks. You know, the incredible tool for modeling and controlling big machines. And so CNC router tables and 3D printers and all that kinda stuff. And so we've got this CAD design for cutting out an arcade cabinet. And it's two sheets of plywood. So that's like 150 bucks, right?
For a nice piece of wood, a hundred bucks for less good, and then about $400 in commodity parts. So think a display, you know, some joysticks, but this is a single cart order on Amazon, a ginormous design for a vinyl sticker. So this is an EPS file. Big, beautiful vinyl sticker that my friend Jimmy Danko designed incredible artist.
And then. The Ubuntu Operating System, which is Linux, it's open source, and then we've got a Custom Debian package, which is their sort of packaging system that makes all the modifications to the Vanilla Operating System install to make it a kiosk so that now it auto logs in and it's got all that stuff sort of preset.
And then the open source game and the open source payment rails. Now, this last part, the payment rails is a really, I think, a neat addition to the world in that once a kid has made this thing right, it's got the game, it's got the game on it, it's got the cabinet, it's got the big, beautiful sticker, so it really looks nice.
They can go take it to a coffee shop or a laundromat and they meet with the owner and they say, Hey, let me put this in here. And whenever somebody comes and plays it, I'll split the money with you. And that is a 100-year-old business, right? You know, it's go, right? It's governed payphones and vending machines and jukeboxes and arcade cabinets.
So the kid, rather than selling candy bars and cookies, they're literally earning passive income once they deploy this thing. It's just a little money tree. And unlike the arcades of your, you know, they don't even have to go there to clean out the money. You know, it's all digital. And so two of the things that's kind of made this project possible is old arcade cabinets were huge because the big CRT monitors really complicated and they were expensive because they had all this gear, all this cash handling infrastructure, you know, and they were like a big safe.
And so without all that, you can do couple sheets of plywood, cheap parts connected to the internet, and you're off and running. And so that part for me, now, the kid has got exposure to all these different domains. They've built something that they hopefully learned something and now they're making money.
[00:16:39] Alex Sarlin: It's so. Cool to hear both sides of the equation here. You know when you talk about your educational philosophy, you say project based authentic, you put something out in the world that actually means something in your own education that was a patented safety device or a safety procedure. Yeah. Stair safe baby walker.
Exactly. And then your now coming full circle and creating these DIY arcades where classrooms or individual students can put together a arcade game can actually, as you say, get paid for it. They can. Create their own games or adapt open source gaming. It is such an amazing and exciting project. So, given the two pieces that you've mentioned, the idea that you know two bid foundation is already in a quarter of LA schools, you already have maker spaces and some devices in schools.
You've really built a maker empire within the Southern California. How do you see the arcade getting into school environments, both in California and as you say, across the country? What is your vision for what that would look like? Really great question.
[00:17:39] Brent Bushnell: So the tools in our tool benches right now are hand tools, drills, and saws and screwdrivers.
But the accessibility of things like a router table, CNC, controlled router table, a mill, a CNC mill, you know, those things are coming down in price. They're getting more accessible. I think this, I just cannot wait for MIT's the Fab in a Box solution coming out of Fab Lab. You know, that is a. Printer, scanner, fax for machine tools.
And so knowing that that stuff is getting more available, I really wanted a project that would be worthy of having those tools, you know? Right. And so this arcade kind of is, you know, a north star for what could be then built inside of a capable tool shop in a school.
[00:18:22] Alex Sarlin: So, I mean, it's easy to imagine really forward thinking schools like, you know, the high tech high or the places around the country that already think about maker spaces already think about.
Project-based learning, sort of embracing this and saying, absolutely, you know, we're also waiting for that fab in a box. We're also absolutely thrilled about projects that excite students that get them motivated. I'm curious because you obviously bring so much enthusiasm and so much experience to this world.
I. Do you think there's a chance to sort of cross the Rubicon and make this even more of a normal experience? Something that you don't need a school staff to be very forward thinking or an individual instructor to be super forward thinking? It's just something that we actually do because we realize the value of authentic project-based learning.
What would that look like and what role would you like to play in sort of making that world a reality?
[00:19:10] Brent Bushnell: Wow. Well, you know, I mean, my hope is that we are packaging this up in a way that feels intuitive, and if you don't know any of these topics, you could sort of follow this recipe and complete it. And then at that point you've hopefully gained some skills, being able to just get to the baseline.
[00:19:26] Alex Sarlin: Yep.
[00:19:27] Brent Bushnell: But then the opportunities for extension is where I think it starts to get really fun. And whether it's the modification to make it a driving game or what if we change the format, let's load up our SolidWorks and make it a countertop unit. Yeah. I want to put it on the top of my table as opposed to freestanding.
Yeah, and being able to sort of take whichever piece of this, the hardware, the software, the approach to the payments, whatever you care about, and being able to kind of riff. And make it your own remix and yeah, and my sort of hope is like an open Cade, like you know, this whole collection that you could have a thousand square foot retail space that would have the communities open source arcade there to monetize and fund the school system or the kids scholarships or whatever.
In fact, the first one we're making right now is with. green.school in Boyle Heights and the students are about halfway through making it. And it's gonna go to Dave and Buster's. It's gonna go to Dave and Buster's in Hollywood and Highland. And I'm just so pumped 'cause I was talking with the, with the guys there and they're like, yeah, you know, average machine, that's not redemption, which is the one that gives the tickets, it's not redemption.
Makes about $300 a month. So that means split with the students 150 bucks. You imagine this is 400, $500 in parts depending on how, you know, this thing's paying for itself in like five months. Yeah, I mean it's like, it's just so cool, you know? And then it's cashflow.
[00:20:39] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It's amazing. And I can imagine sort of combining it with your traveling.
Carnival style where you have a traveling arcade of games all created by students that other other schools and students can play, which inspires this sort of positive loop. I mean, it's such an exciting ecosystem and you are so deep in some movements that I admire so much, but we don't talk about probably nearly enough on this podcast, so I'd actually love to just hear you talk about them a little more broadly.
One is the maker movement, and the other is the open source movement is the idea of creating. Systems and tools that anybody can remix and even commercialize, especially, and even students and young people. Can you just for people who aren't nearly as deep, including myself in that world, tell me about the evolution of the Maker movement and the open source movement in the time that you've been doing Tbit Circus.
I.
[00:21:26] Brent Bushnell: Yeah. Oh man. I just love those two movements so much and have, you know, so much personal value from them both and feel like they have brought so much to my life. So I really am so glad you commented, you know, highlighted those. So I studied computer science at UCLA and UCLA has a great. Engineering school and was one of the first universities on the internet.
And you know, a lot of my professors were some of those people, you know, I got to take a class from Alan K, the adventure of the laptop and so really, you know, amazing place to be. But we used a lot of open source and, you know, people are really familiar with. Apple and Microsoft. But Linux is this entirely free operating system, and it's got a GUI and mouse and apps that look like Microsoft Word and Gimp, which is an incredible photo editor.
You know, like Photoshop. I mean, there is a open source alternative for just about every major application that you use on your normal computer. And the open source is a community of developers around the world that are basically making their modifications to a free and publicly, it's like Wikipedia for software, right?
And so everybody's gi the Photoshop alternative, you know, there's a whole bunch of developers who love photo editing software and, and are contributing free modules and plugins and, you know, all that stuff. And. You can download that and use it as a consumer. You don't need to be a coder to use it. You just download it like you would a normal app.
And in fact, gimp will run on your Mac, you know, and on your windows. They've got ports for that. And so open source, it runs most of the internet, first of all. I mean like most of the web websites that you're visiting, the servers serving up those webpages or probably Linux with an Apache web server, which is open source or an Engine X, which is open source.
I mean, all these solutions that are. Frankly, sometimes way more powerful. The entire programmers on Earth are more programmers than Microsoft has, you know, and so it's like there's a real powerful thing that happens when you get a bunch of researchers testing these, you know, I mean, even the SSL, the way that we encrypt information over the internet, these are all open source things that when everybody can see it.
It also really, you know, for penetration testing and figuring out where this thing is gonna break, you know, you really have got the scale of humanity to be able to lever. So open source is just an absolutely super powerful thing. And as a result, there's tons of open source games, you know, and there's something that looks like Super Mario Brothers, and there's something that looks like Grand Smo, and there's something that looks like your favorite arcade games.
And so as a result, a student who doesn't know about any of this stuff could do a search, find some games that they find interesting, and then when they download that. This is the path to learning how to program is you start by modifying somebody else's. You know, you download it and you make it, have your name, and you may change the colors, you know, and these, you just are bumbling around, you know, as you figure out what it looks like.
And so open source is this powerful solution for real business and also for learning.
[00:24:13] Alex Sarlin: Amazing. And let's talk about the maker movement. Hit me.
[00:24:15] Brent Bushnell: Oh yeah. So the Maker movement is just so near and dear to my heart, and it is really, you know, I think we used to have shop class in schools and stuff, and funding went away for that.
And the same sort of ethos has emerged as the maker movement and more than just shop class, this is. A real celebration of the fact that hobbyists are out there doing all kinds of cool stuff, whether they're making furniture or they are doing citizen science, or you know, astronomy or whatnot. Like all of these tools are not just for universities anymore.
And with the internet, all those people found each other and they started publishing recipes on how to do it, you know? And so all of a sudden you could decide that you were not gonna pay somebody else. To do this thing for you, but you're gonna build the deck yourself, but you're gonna instrument your room with a sensor so that you know when the doors closed, like as the tech got easy, fun, imaginative solutions got attainable.
And so whether it was cheap sensors and Arduinos or you know, when the Connect, the Microsoft Connect. Camera, you know, that made depth sensing cameras something that makers could play around with. I mean, that was like computer visions. This was the realm of PhDs for decades. But then all of a sudden it was open source and on a weekend you could have some fun and make something meaningful.
And so as tech got more accessible and people found each other online, the Maker movement exploded with. Places for people to be able to create and ways for people to be able to create. And then as the tools got better and cheaper and more capable, the kinds of things people could make got more awesome.
Yep. You know, and all of a sudden you're making your own self-driving car, you know, or your own crazy monster robot like that is shocking. If you could have told me as a little kid that I could make a robot with all of my own solutions inside it, I mean, that's just really magical. Yeah.
[00:26:01] Alex Sarlin: So, I mean, when you go to a Maker Fair or any of these gatherings where people like you say, come together to show the machines, to show their projects, it is truly mind blowing.
And exactly the way you're saying. I've seen 10-year-old kids sitting there with their five foot tall robot with, you know, four arms and saying, yeah, I made this myself. It is. Truly flabbergasting. So let me double click on this 'cause I really wanna get to one aspect of it. You mentioned, and I think this was so prescient, that we used to have shop class in schools and now we really don't.
Kids do very little with their hands in schools. In a normal day, in a normal school these days, unfortunately there's very little maker at all, unless they have a, you know, a maker. Studio or they sort of lean into it in various ways, but it's, it's sort of been pushed out in the name of English and math in many cases.
Sometimes science even labs are less and less frequent. And then to your point about open source, you know, the ability to use all of this incredible global open source software is so rich, but it still requires a little bit of coding. You can learn how to code through it, and I think that's that people do.
But it's still sort of entering into a world that schools are not in and not enough schools teach even base level coding to be able to enter that world. So I have a two part question on this. You know, first, do you see a world in which these tools can actually push into schools? These movements should, can push into schools and help revive some of that hands-on or some of that authentic, you know, I can actually build something or code something myself, mentality.
And secondly. We talk a lot on this podcast about AI and how AI may be pushing the needle on things like coding copilots or 3D printing, being able to 3D print something without having to even know, even CAD or any of these program Maya or anything, because you could just describe what you want and it knows how to do it.
Do you see AI as a bridge sort of helping even young students being able to code or build, even though they're not being taught to in school?
[00:27:58] Brent Bushnell: Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, I think AI has the potential to sort of guide the learner on a path you can have as part of your prompt, use the Socratic method and that's really cool.
You know, all of a sudden we're gonna have this as a, to be prompting me on my learning journey. Totally. I dunno if you ever read Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age. Yeah. But this was such a magical idea of this like tablet with this learning entity on the other side that sort of had a catalog of everything you knew.
And because it had grown up with you and it had helped you learn it all, you know? Right. And my dad used to say like, Hey, could you go through high school in two years? You know, if we fixed the efficiencies. I mean, and then it's like, what do you do with those extra two years?
You know, back to the shop class piece, and JPL had this problem. They realized, I don't know, like a decade ago, that their engineers weren't as good as the ones that were retiring. And what they started to realize was the modern generation wasn't using their hands. Anymore. You know, they were in the internet and they had been sucked in and they weren't using physical tools and and whatnot, and it was actually made them less capable.
And it was like that variety of exposure and understanding, maybe down to the base metal, you know, like what's going on was made for a more well-rounded and capable engineer. I think it was Carl Sagan kind of predicted the situation we're in right now where like all manufacturing, all making of stuff has been offshore.
Right. You know, and we just are thinking here, you know, and that is not good. You know, being able to physically produce is just incredibly important and the tools have just gotten better. So we really being able to kind of reintroduce them now you can be so much more capable and create so much more than you could in those old shops classes.
[00:29:43] Alex Sarlin: I think now when you talk to students who are making their own arcade games or modifying their own software or all those things, you know, in my experience at least, they tend to do that because they're somebody in their life who has introduced them to that world. And often it's actually a parent. It's often somebody outside of their formal education.
But in some cases, if they're lucky, they are in a school system like Green Dot, like you mentioned, that embraces this kind of world. I. What I'm so interested among many things about your work is you really actively try to bridge these worlds. You are obviously so deep and really understand the makerspace, all the machines that keeping abreast of all the new technologies, but you also are realistic about I.
How do we get this over the hump into the hands of students who don't have a parent who also, you know, spends their weekends tinkering on building their own thing or don't have a, aren't lucky enough to have a Makerspace in their school yet, but they want to figure out how to get there. So let's talk about that aspect of it when you talk to your school partners through the two bit foundation.
You're doing this amazing work with, you know, clean waste. What kind of profile would you say, like what do you have to do to help them sort of catch the enthusiasm that you obviously have for this type of learning? Because some people already converted and others just can't even see it. I'm curious how that conversation goes.
[00:31:03] Brent Bushnell: Great question and you nailed it, which is the people who are already converted, you know, being able to find that inspired person on the inside who like they care and they see the possibility and they're gonna sort of go to bat inside of their organization is just critical. You know? And that can be one person who's just like, I get it.
I believe they will help to move the mountains that you know that it takes. And so that part is really critical. And oftentimes those people come out of the word work and find us. So that's a wonderful solution. And it was so awesome. I just toured. The San, the new Santa Monica High School and they have this massive center with a mock courtroom and a ginormous tool shop of like so many awesome things.
And, and the part that was so incredible to me was they had a lot of their. Programs were available for hire local communities. We're getting ready to hire the, their graphic design team, and I'm gonna test them getting, making a flyer for us. Wow. And so they have a, an advanced graphic design course that covers Illustrator and Photoshop.
And here the professor who is the inspired one in this context, has made that available as a resource to the community. And again. They're in business now, you know? And I think that on of full circle of connecting it to real life, yeah, makes it real. It takes it outta the ethereal and the theoretical and makes it something you can really relate to.
And so I keep having this vision of students across the country with their tools and makerspace. Then a set of products that they could make that might be relevant for their geography. So the kids in Maine have a great oyster shucker, you know, and, and you could buy from them the oyster shucker and it's got a 3D printed handle and a little metal thing, and that's their thing.
And the kids in, in Los Angeles, they've got a great surf wax solution. You know, surf wax holder. I don't know. Imagine an open repository of fabric. Things that kids could do in their schools then becomes the modern bake sale. Yeah. And the kids in Rhode Island can riff on the design for the kids in Maine, you know, and make it their own.
I just feel like that would be such a cool. Thing that would be great for the community and great for the kids, and
[00:33:08] Alex Sarlin: yeah. And that ability to transfer something into your own context, right. To localize it. To make it make sense. And I think comes with the territory with some of these open source and maker movements, which is part of what's so exciting about it.
You can have. Somebody in, you know, Norway creating a 3D model and then a kid in Texas saying, good idea, but in Texas I'm gonna do it this way. Or because I'm 15, I'm gonna do this with it.
[00:33:30] Brent Bushnell: Yeah. And you only need one person to open source their oyster shucker design. Exactly. And all of a sudden the whole world has it.
And that's a superpower. The fact that the data is free, that sort of remixing. And I think this was another really core component of, of the Maker movement, is that I'm gonna take what you started and I'm gonna take it over in this direction. And so it's like you've set the floor of what I can do and now I'm gonna just do something else, you know, riff on
[00:33:55] Alex Sarlin: it and the floor keeps raising because people keep contributing to it.
You mentioned Santa Monica and I want to ask about a project. You are right in the middle of right now, I think tomorrow as we are recording this, you are opening up to the public a really exciting, very new thing on the Santa Monica third Street Boulevard That is. Maybe perhaps the next chapter in What Two Bit Circus is doing.
Tell us about what you're doing with these Steam Game shows and this idea of just collaborative competitive gaming in this particular way. Yeah.
[00:34:25] Brent Bushnell: Thanks for that. It's really an exciting moment. We've got this 4,000 square foot venue on the Third Street Promenade, which is a walking mall, you know, right in downtown Santa Monica, Los Angeles.
What we've got is it's got a bunch of modern, futuristic entertainment, mixed reality headsets and a space elevator from our friend Chris Klaviyo, and a bunch of classics like arcade games, you know, that you would recognize Joust and Pacman and that kinda stuff. And then it's also got this game show. And the game show.
I'm holding up this box of buttons. This is a wireless box of arcade buttons that I made, and it's got a custom circuit board that you can upload to a website and they'll solder the components for you and ship it back. And so I've got a whole bunch of those boxes and then a game front end that runs through a whole variety show of mini games.
So there is button smash, just hit the buttons as much you possibly can, you know? And for up to 25 controllers, which could be a hundred people, everybody's playing this game show. And so button mash into trivia, into memory games, into 18 different mini games. And so depending on the content and the mini games you select, it could be.
A fun thing for adults on a Friday night like bar trivia, and it can also, 10:00 AM on Monday, you change the content and it's STEM and STEAM related and it's all about your astronomy module and all of a sudden it's a steam game show. And so what we're doing is I think of Tuit Circuses as kind of a new kind of community center, and we're always really focused on.
Technology that can be multimodal. And so, you know, mixed reality headset is a great example. That can be a immersive nurse training simulator in the morning and then a zombie shooter in the night, right? You know, and so the business model can be driven by the zombie shooter at night. Being able to sell alcohol around that and have a modern, futuristic kind of restaurant bar arcade.
But then a lot of those same tools, unlike the arcades of your, which used to be Pacman, was always Pacman and that cabinet didn't change at all. Now all of a sudden we can say, Hey, let's change the software. And all these things can be now made into a learning context. And that's where I feel like you get this sort of superpower of being able to have the night business kind of fund getting this cool tech.
Into a place that can then be made available in other contexts.
[00:36:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Which I think dovetails with what you're mentioning about Santa Monica High School, where you can make a big makerspace or make amazing resources for your students that are educational, but then also offer them to the community or to upskilling adults.
I. I see such an exciting theme in all of your work, and I just, I mean, it's so different from each other, but it has this very, very clear theme of breaking down boundaries, especially between formal learning or formal environments and entertainment venues and entertainment environments. I think that encapsulates it perfectly, right?
It's a nursing simulator in the morning and a zombie shooter at night, and that could be true of software, it could be true of hardware, it could be true of a space, it could be true of a combination of controller. And a screen. It feels like the future to me, when I hear you talk about it, it's not only is your enthusiasm so contagious, but you understand this space really, really well.
And I think don't see the barriers that a lot of people see when they think about education. They say, why would we do that in a school? Or how would we take something in a school and then use it outside the school? That doesn't make sense. The, the lab is the lab. It's only for students, you know? It is just such a common.
The barrier of thinking. So I guess in that vein, I'd love to ask you how. Are so comfortable thinking outside of the box, what do you attribute it to? The fact that you don't see those limits? You can take a music video and it can become something that physics teachers are using in the classroom, which can then become a traveling steam circus, which can then become a, you know, which can then become a standing venue for years.
And tube circuit is amazing. You know, I've been there many times with my family and it is like truly incredible. We didn't even talk about escape rooms. I'll ask you about that. Oh. What do you attribute that fluidity of thinking to? Because I think that this is a type of thought that a lot of people in education could really benefit
[00:38:21] Brent Bushnell: from.
Game design is an iterative process, and what happens is you have an idea. All so many projects are iterative, but, but game design, you start with the paper prototype, you know, you're like, Hey, I've got an idea for game. Maybe it looks like this. Let's do, let's draw it on paper and let's see if we can, is that fun?
You know, like, let's you and I just test it for a second. And they're like, yeah, that is sort of fun. Like, what if we change this and this? Mm-hmm. And, and now we, now we add real programming to it, and now it starts to get a little more real. You know, and then you go back and you test it on people again, and you're like, oh, that's good, but this is bad.
And that iterative, not thinking of it as failure, thinking of it as an evolution, you know, it's like you built this thing, it's not really finished yet, and it's gonna, and the way that it will get finished is by engaging with. The users, you know, and testing it and trying it and evolving it. And I think really even Tbit itself, we've been doing that and that evolution of sort of listening like, okay, what are the brands willing to fund?
What are the investors open to? What's the market situation with retail? All of those things sort of as we were. Evolving our approach and figuring out new ways to engage and entertain and, and educate. You know, that we needed to keep looking back of like, is this working or not working? What part of this is working?
Let's keep tweaking that. And so I think a commitment to evolution and being willing to sort of look. At what's not working and tweak it and you know, change those things. I think a really important one, I totally, I benefited so massively from being around inspiring people. Yeah. You know, I mean, you know, Tom Wisdom, my physics professor, he went out, he took a risk with a new approach that was just massively awesome.
My dad is a total nerd and engineer and creator, and so I really, you know, I think. Kids need to be told that they can do things and that it's not just for somebody else, you know, but that anybody can do it. And I, you know, and I think just that awareness that both you can, or that it's even a job for someone to test video games or a job for someone to, you know, make the art inside of game.
You know, like it, sometimes that stuff just can feel magical and not tethered to a reality. And so I, I really benefited from people who I. Said, you can do it, Brent. Yeah, if you wanna, and I think that is a really powerful thing that every kid should be told.
[00:40:29] Alex Sarlin: I mean, I hear that the sort of growth mindset type of thinking where you say, you know, every failure is an opportunity, it's not a failure.
You know everything. You try what you learn from it doesn't matter. If it works or if part of it works or not. It's not about an ego. It's about just continuing to see what happens and collaborate with other people, test things with people, and then be around inspiring people, which I think is underrated.
Really
[00:40:51] Brent Bushnell: underrated. Underrated. Being around inspiring people is underrated, and I think that we have this idea, the foundation of cascading mentorship and people can be a. All levels of the inspiration curve. And I try to encourage when on public speaking, encourage people to be mentors because everybody can be a mentor in something.
And particularly for kids being able to say, Hey, this is how it worked for me. Or being able to be the one to tell those kids that they can do it. So it's good to have that come from somebody other than your parents.
[00:41:17] Alex Sarlin: It's true and it can truly change a life. I mean, you know, a lot of people, when you ask them where they got the idea to follow the career they're going into or go to the university they go to, or all sorts of things, they'll attribute it to, you know, a moment or a conversation or a single person.
It's not always this huge evolution of thinking. It's often. One inspiring twist or epiphany that can come from anywhere and I think become being that the person who can, uh, who can provide that for people is incredibly meaningful. Let's talk about the escape rooms because this is something people who have listened to this podcast for a while know that I met a teacher at a conference who had been working with school ai.
And basically had created escape rooms as projects, totally virtual escape rooms inside the computer, but as projects for students to teach. And it was just the most interesting idea. It was like, oh, you're, you're put in a situation and because AI can be adaptive, it was like, you have to find your way out by figuring out what's going on and, and put together the facts.
And I was like, that blew my mind. You have been a pioneer in escape rooms. You've been doing escape rooms since. Before, I think most people had heard of them. There's a term.
[00:42:18] Brent Bushnell: Tell us about your escape room history. So Eric and I and my brother Tyler, we started really before escape rooms were a thing. I mean, this was like, they did not exist.
That term didn't exist. And we wanted a live action video game. You know, we wanted to be in the game. And so we actually built this, we called it Vice, the Verex Institute for Counter Espionage. And the idea was you. Applying to be a part of this spy agency. And as part of that application, you were gonna have to drive in a simulator, really, you know, in a car, in a car simulator, you're gonna have to do this game of observation.
You're gonna have to get through a room of laser beams, you're gonna have to decode stuff with a UV pen and pa, you know, and light. And so it was this 45 minute. Experience that went through all these different attractions we'd made, and we filmed our friends as the Charlie's Angels characters that were leading you along the path.
And so it had produced media, it had all the different attractions, and then you sort of went through them step by step. We tried to describe it to people and it took us a paragraph, you know, we were like, this is sort of like a movie meets a. Puzzle meets a game and you come to a physical location and people were like, what?
You know, do I download an app? And we're like, no. It's a physical thing, you know? And now you'd say, oh, it's sort of like an escape room. Exactly. They'd be, you know, but like back then nobody had any idea what we were doing. Totally. And so we didn't have enough conviction to like start selling tickets. We just really made it for our friends and never really did anything with it until later.
We, we built a spaceship that we, together with Dave and Busters that was, you know, a room. Multiple different consoles. You know, the pilot, the gunner, the navigator, the engineer, and then a 15 minute narrative where we all work together to make sure that we don't blow up the spaceship. We think of escape rooms as a subset of a much bigger category we call story rooms.
Mm-hmm. Because what happens if it's not about escaping, you know, and you wanna. Navigate a star, a Starship, or we've got a doctor simulator where you're all in a, you know, you're operating on this big puppet in this operation room. We had a candy factory simulator, you know, and so you're all working together.
Like I love Lucy in the chocolate factory, you know, to like make recipes and they're more like job simulators, right? Basically. And the thing that gets fun there is. You are the character. You know, most of the time you're controlling a video game with your thumbs, you know, and the character's over there.
But now it's like, it's you. How fast can you move? How high can you jump? You know? I mean, it's like these things that end up being really important, but Mario will do it for you all day long. For me, these immersive technologies I love. You mentioned escape rooms. There's another place where it's great for entertainment and you can make them for learning.
The teachers are making escape rooms with their kids and there's this whole, because it's exciting because it's in interesting, it's this great pathway for learning and I think the future, future of education standpoint, the, you know, the thing that is the best is. You learn the best when you have the most amount of your sensors involved.
The most amount of your senses, right? Like it's sight and sound and maybe taste and you know, and, and even better if it's in the presence of emotion, right? So if it's emotion and all your senses. And so virtual reality gets pretty close and a mixed reality starts to get even closer, where now you're moving your body around.
But I could have a rip. Repeatable version of something for you. You know, interestingly enough, the best scans of the Notre Dame belonged to Ubisoft, Ubisoft, the game company that made Assassin's Creed, and they wanted Assassin's Creed to be so historically accurate. They had historians on staff and they, you know, made the fricking Notre Dame be perfectly photoreal.
Wow. You know. Well, when the French government went to fricking recreate it because of the fires, they tapped Ubisoft, you know, to be able to do it. Now, the cool thing about that is not only does that make for a great game in Assassin's Creed, but they took those same models and they made it so that any student could wander around Notre Dame.
And so this is now some really expensive to fly every student on Earth to Paris For a while you couldn't even do that if you were in Paris, you know, because they were reconstructing it. But you could put anybody in a simulation and walk them around it. In the headset. And so that's where I start to feel like the future of learning is I put you in a headset and you're gonna go have to repair the amusement park and the rollercoaster, and you're gonna learn a little bit about welding, a little bit about viscosity, a little bit about throughput and business.
And by the time you're done, the rollercoaster will be fixed. It'll all have been in a simulation. But again, like here's a cool thing that kids care about, but they also are now gonna learn some fundamental skills. And the more that that stuff to me becomes real, you know, it becomes a real activity that is, it's got the scaffolding and it's takes you along on the learning journey so that it is repeatable and we can document it and know that it's effective, but be able to have that be, feel like it's real, you know?
And then that it'll feel like real life.
[00:46:54] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It's interesting, the extended reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, you know, virtual reality world is one that I think everybody who reads science fiction like the Diamond Age and everybody who sort of cares about, about education has been keeping their eye on for a long time.
And we've been so excited about, and I, you know, there's been a lot of. False hopes or, you know, moments where it felt like it was gonna break through. I have not given up hope on this. Even despite like Google Glass and all the hiccups we've had, I really think we are getting close to the moment where, for exactly the reason you just said, because there are three dimensional scans of everything in Notre Dame, because mixed reality allows you to actually be in and out of the real world.
When I've tried the Apple Vision Pro, I'm like, this is something, this is next level stuff. When we do crack it, the type of incredibly imaginative and pioneering education that you are talking about here, where you could walk around a physical space that also has, you know, mapped onto it all of these learning activities or that you could take an escape room and use it for entertainment at night and then for learning in the morning.
And suddenly these things become incredibly possible. But it takes imagination. It's not just about the hardware, it's about the software too.
[00:48:06] Brent Bushnell: I would say from a hardware standpoint, we're there, the Medi Quest three that they launched a couple of months ago is a $300 device. Yeah. I mean, adjusted for inflation.
The Nintendo Entertainment System was more, and so when I think about when we first imagined two bit in downtown LA to do a worse version of vr, I needed a $2,000 computer, a $2,000 headset. Tethered five feet to the thing. So I needed to put it up in big truss. You know, by the time we were done it was 10 grand and it wasn't as awesome as what you can do in a $300 headset that's free roam and needs none of that.
It's true, and that is, you know, more than an order of magnitude in cost reduction and the content has just continued to get better. Yeah.
[00:48:42] Alex Sarlin: And the hardware really matters. One of our most popular interviews last I, gosh, I was it 2022, was with the, the head of meta education. And her take was similar to what you just said.
It's there. We have incredible simulations. We have incredible immersive experiences, and the technology is great and it's only getting better, but it's just about like, how do we maneuver the ecosystem? How do we help? Teachers and schools get these devices. How do we help people make sense of the different pieces of it that that need to be done?
How do we encourage developers to create educational software? Because they can still make more money most of the time doing something for entertainment. There's systemic change that is needs to happen, but I think we're on the verge of it. And I think people like yourself who really play very smoothly in both the entertainment world and the education world are going to be leading the way.
I, I'm really excited about the reach of this interview because I think people are gonna hear it. I think some of those converted educators inside schools, the only one who realizes that they need a makerspace or the only one who's been funding it. Or people who are saying, yes, virtual reality or, yes, upcycling, clean waste.
Like these are all such. Innovative ideas and it just makes what formerly felt impossible, feel extremely reachable. It just makes, for me, it makes me just wanna jump in and make these things happen and I think you've had a whole career and are continuing to do it. Launching something tomorrow as well.
So I wish we had more time. Dude, this has been so fun. Really. It's so fun. But we'll plan apart part two and we can talk about a whole other set of things. But this has been an amazing interview and I hope people's wheels are spinning even half as fast as my mine or twice as fast as mine because there's so much that can happen here.
This is Brent Bushnell. He's the co-founder and CEO of Two Bit Circus, which is a live entertainment company that also does so many different things, and he's chairman of the Nonprofit two Bit Foundation, which uses games and play to inspire students about invention. Thanks so much for being here with us, Brent, on EdTech Insiders.
Alex, thanks so much for having me. This was a real joy. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.
