How I Gamify Learning

Key Takeaways

[Music] for the past few weeks i've been learning how to use unreal engine a tool i had no previous knowledge of as fast and efficiently as possible right now i'm actively developing a free machine learning game for beginners called code royale with a small team i've assembled but more on code royale later in this video tutorial i want to show you how i learn things in general and will use my learning strategy to build a simple statistics game demo together in unreal engine my learning strategy consists of playing three games i've designed for myself every single week avoid the hooks contact free circuit and explore the space avoid the hooks is for the mind contact free circuit is for the body which thankfully helped me get shredded these past few months and explore the space is for the spirit we're going to go through the details of each of these games together starting with avoid the hooks the goal of avoid the hooks is to successfully complete a minimum number of hours of dedicated learning time every week while avoiding algorithmic hooks the beauty of recommendation algorithms are that they can help us find a learning resource we didn't even know we wanted but their curse is that they're optimizing for our attention not to educate us the way to reap the benefits of algorithms without getting unintentionally hooked is to intentionally set aside dedicated learning resource discovery time and during that time we are consciously working alongside recommendation algorithms to find the optimal learning content for us i use sticky notes to keep track of my day week month year and five year learning goals very motivating the way i keep track of this goal i.e my feedback system is my pomodoro score i just use a chrome extension to remind me when it's time to periodically take a break and reset my mind i also set my phone to grayscale mode to avoid being hooked by color manipulation and have my app usage chart prevalent on my home screen to keep track of my activity so as we avoid the hooks let's search for an optimal learning resource for unreal engine on reddit the upvote functionality of reddit means the most popular resources will be at the top we can open them all up and i definitely prefer video playlists to start learning looks like unreal themselves have an epic tutorial playlist but so does this independent educator named katie so we'll go with katie as our initial learning direction and now that we have a direction it's all about magnitude meaning how intensely can we learn from these resources before we make a statistics game let's just mess around by seeing if we can create a simple battle royale type game that lets 100 players try to be the last man standing in a death match and that sounds difficult but turns out there's several battle royale templates on the unreal engine store so once we install one we can add on other types of map layouts from the unreal store to make the entire base map bigger and more varied it gets pretty crazy as you can see there's an absolute combinatorial explosion of complexity that can arise in any game full of assets and game mechanics and design patterns and networking code there's so much with unreal we can use blueprints a visual scripting system or c plus plus to write out game logic and in order to brush up on my c plus plus knowledge let's use gpt 3 open ai state of the art language model via this website simplify.so to quickly create a simplified explanation of how pointers and memory work in c plus plus now having learned a bit of the basics of the unreal editor we can move on to building our statistics game i beg to dream and differ from memory management but the pomodoro timer says it's time for a break we can do this by playing my second game contact free circuit because of the pandemic it's much harder to play full contact sports like kickboxing with people in person due to the health hazards but contact free sports like echo arena offer the same competitive physical play in the safety of your own home my entire garage is dedicated to echo arena and i practice every single day echo is a multiplayer vr esport it's basically space hockey 4v4 matches and you got to get the disc into the goal i love echo i love winning games i love the camaraderie that comes from it the celebrations the smack talking everything it is the future of sports my favorite part is stunning people i'm like a beater and quidditch the game requires hand-eye coordination flexibility agility fast response times muscle memory upper body strength and coordination so the more fit you are in real life the more capable you'll be in the game my daily workout routine called the no contact circuit helps me improve my echo performance the equipment i use are two water jugs and a city birds pull up set that's it i dedicate different days to back and biceps triceps and chest legs and full body i also dedicate two days to 15-minute hit routines they're just the same fitnessblender.com videos i've been watching for months now i used to eat ubereats every single day and i get nauseous just thinking about all that unhealthy food we have to unlearn our addictions avoid the hooks remember the over stimulation of fats and sugar and salt and oil that food companies use to addict us while i used to salivate for cheesy nachos now i salivate for fresh beets and rainbow carrots seriously it didn't happen overnight but with time your body will adapt i follow a 16-8 intermittent fasting diet and in that eight hour period i eat twice my first meal is lunch which is a plant smoothie i blend together it's delicious and i've actually been growing my own little garden for the first time it's been such a joy growing tomatoes and pumpkins and collard greens and all sorts of hot peppers i often pick out plants blend them and consume them the same day i also have four little protein factories i mean chickens who i've had since they were babies and hopefully they'll soon lay me lots of eggs okay so our pomodoro break is now over let's get back to building our statistics game in statistics three basic terms are the mean median and mode which are statistical measures of center the mode is the most common number in a collection of numbers so what we want to do is we want to create a game around that called find the mode where we're given a collection of numbers and then we have to use mental math to just basically look at those numbers and decide which is the mode which is the most common number from that list and then once we know what that number is we want to draw it and if we look through the unreal engine store peter mccharzelski has this beautiful speech recognizer plugin that he built that we can download and use in our project so we're going to create a brand new empty game in unreal engine called find the mode and then we're going to add the plug-in in so it shows up and we can see it at the top of the dashboard and then we can open up peter's plug-in right inside of unreal engine and see all this incredible functionality that he's built in and we can play around with it a little bit first and the first thing we'll do is we'll load up the test map that he built and we can see that there's already several games that we could play inside of this test snap and if we test out this drawing interface we can just draw our own symbols and then convert them to training data automatically basically what this is is it's a neural network built in c plus plus that has a gui to train the network we can even train the network without touching code i mean most of this we can do without touching code that's part of the beauty of unreal is there's so much visual scripting involved we'll notice that all this falling cube logic that we notice in this first game is in blueprints so we can see that logic in blueprints what time it's falling what are the intervals what are the rates what are the symbols that are falling but if we want to find this neural network we're going to have to go into the c plus code and there are quite a few files here but really the main neural network is just right here in this file it seems like it's a feed forward network there are a bunch of event listeners and helper functions that are happening here but we're going to add our own little simple c plus logic here that says that instead of these symbols that are being generated let's just generate some random numbers between one and nine so we want to have some very very simple numbers and we're going to generate let's say five of them and then we're going to display them to the user in the gui later using blueprints so that's the game it's basically timed mental math exercises in statistics which uses machine learning to implement basic drawing functionality and now we're at the end of the day we finished playing avoid the hooks for eight hours and contact free circuit for one hour but there's one more game to play explore the space the goal of explore the space is to strengthen a social bond ideally with a study buddy someone who is learning the same things as you are because one of the most effective things you can do to learn something besides building is teaching and exchanging ideas with friends back and forth while exploring a virtual or physical space is something that i often do but it doesn't necessarily have to be with an existing friend it could just be for the sake of social interaction which is an essential need we all have as social creatures my favorite game in this regard is fortnite coordinating and communicating with teammates to stay alive is so much fun it's relaxing and it helps me prepare for the next learning sprint but there are others pokemon go is an augmented reality game you can use to explore the space of base reality with a friend or geocaching finding a human-placed item on a map together a real life treasure hunt and all you need is a phone so those are the three games i play every single week in order to learn as fast and efficiently as possible avoid the hooks no contact circuit and explore the space i have some sick videos coming up in the coming weeks so make sure to subscribe to stay up to date code royale season 1 is gonna start soon until next time happy learning