812: Press Start for Success - with Philip Courtney, CEO, Urban Arts, & Cynthia Williams⁠, President, ⁠Wizards of the Coast⁠ & ⁠Hasbro Gaming⁠

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Dr. Joe Sallustio here on another episode. I'm a little out of breath. I literally ran, and I mean it, ran across campus. I'm about 15 minutes late for like two of the guests I've been waiting months to get on my podcast. And of course this is the day that I can't make it in time, but they've been hanging out with Elvin. I'm surprised after hanging out with Elvin that they didn't just leave, but they've stayed.

Ladies and gentlemen, my first guest, here he is. His name is Philip Courtney. He is the CEO of Urban Arts. Philip, how are you?

Philip Courtney: I'm well, thank you. Nice to meet you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Nice to meet you. Thanks for waiting and thanks for coming on the podcast. We're really excited to hear more about Urban Arts, but I do want to bring in my second guest as well. Ladies and gentlemen, here she is. Her name is Cynthia Williams and she is the president of Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Gaming. You might have heard of Hasbro before. Cynthia, how are you?

Cynthia Williams: I'm wonderful. How are you?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Again, thank you so much for waiting for me. I feel like I've done you both a disservice, but by the end of this, you're going to forget that you had to wait because we're going to have so much fun. We're going to kick it back over to Philip first. Urban Arts, Philip, tell us, just give us the two-minute update on Urban Arts and let's assume somebody listening to this podcast has not heard of Urban Arts before.

Philip Courtney: Well, thank you. So Urban Arts is an arts and technology not-for-profit. We serve underrepresented students from low-income communities and we teach them the art and science of game development. So how to make video games and everything that goes into that, including obviously the computer science piece, the coding, or that of course is changing rapidly with AI, but also the art forms that go into making a video game, the music, the storytelling, most importantly, the storytelling and of course the animation and every other sort of art form you would see expressed through a video game. 

So those are the hard skills we teach students and obviously there are a huge amount of soft skills involved in that. We couple that with what I like to call a private school level college access service to these students for free, so that they can matriculate to college and maximize scholarships. Obviously, the college debt problem being something that we are also focused on being a nonprofit that serves low-income students. So our students learn all the skills for video games. They create amazing portfolios and they matriculate to college. And so far they have earned roughly 16, 17 million dollars in college scholarships in the last six years.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing. How long has Urban Arts been around? How many years have you been doing this?

Philip Courtney: Well, we've been around for about 30 years, but it's only in the last six years that we pivoted from being a very general organization doing lots of different art forms at every level, K through 12. And we were doing some of them well and some of them not so well as you can imagine. A lot of different sort of plate spinning as it were. Six years ago, we doubled down and said, what do we want to be when we grow up? And when we thought about the potential for economic mobility for our students, which really was the major factor. Yes, arts are fantastic. They're a human right. But you know, if we want economic mobility for our young people, then the intersection of arts and tech, in this case, gaming, right? Teaching those hard skills, computer science skills, along with the art forms, and perhaps Cynthia at some point will concur. The skills that these students develop give them such a leg up in the world of work in the future.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, smart move. I mean, gaming has exploded in the last couple of decades. I mean, I'm an individual that goes all the way back to, I mean, you start thinking about gaming that's how I learned as a kid, part of how I learned was through gaming. And Cynthia, I'm assuming as the president of Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Gaming, you know a thing or two about gaming. Talk to us about Wizards of the Coast and talk to us about Hasbro. Let's assume even though it'd be really, it would be one heck of an assumption that somebody goes "I don't know what Hasbro is" but because they've probably seen it on the Monopoly board at some point. Talk about what you do and how you do it.

Cynthia Williams: Yeah, first of all, thanks for having us. I'm super excited to talk about this. We so strongly believe that there's such power in play and games are one of the key components for doing that. I have the immense honor of leading the teams that create and run the games from Magic: The Gathering, which is Hasbro's first billion-dollar brand, to Dungeons & Dragons, which is the world's most famous role-playing game and has been around 50 years in 2024. We're having our anniversary this year, as well as some of the OG board games. You've got Monopoly and Scrabble and Candyland, which was the first board game I ever played and I learned to count playing Candyland. 

Additionally, we started investing in digital games. And as of the Video Game Awards this past December, we announced our first premium game we're launching called Exodus. So if you haven't, go check out the trailer. It's pretty cool.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know what? Admission. I just downloaded two weeks ago, Monopoly on my phone for five bucks because I played with my kids over the break, you know, over the Christmas break. And I remembered how much I love it. And I was teaching my eight-year-old to make change. Right. That's what we're teaching her to make change through Monopoly. And she buys something. And, you know, we take our sweet time because she's got to figure out the hundreds and fifties and the twenties. And you start to think about, wow, financial preparation.

Are we going to get to the point as humans where we don't know how to make change anymore? Because I got to do it on a little app. So you think about those skills and how much gaming, and I'm a big believer in gaming, how much you can learn resilience and grit and teamwork. And I go back over to you, Philip, for a second in Urban Arts. You've really moved gaming into the classroom, right? You've gotten a second grant. I want you to talk about the grant that you received.

You know, STEAM degrees. I mean, this is an important part of the way technology is moving. And gaming is going to be embedded in everything in some way, isn't it?

Philip Courtney: Yeah, in every consumer creator experience. It's huge. Yeah, so actually, small correction on our side. It's our third US Department of Education grant totaling around, well, totaling 12 million investment from the US Department of Education. It is a good correction. It's not easy to get the US Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement. These grants are designed to sort of scale what works in education. Well, firstly, identify a problem, which is black and brown students from low-income communities getting into the STEM field, developing a STEM identity. And so we have, so yeah, we work outside of the classroom, but as you just mentioned inside as well.

We have a couple of programs. The newest grant we just got back in December is a partnership with Minecraft Education for middle school students. So that's an introduction to computer science. Minecraft has obviously built an amazing ecosystem, obviously a hugely successful game. But Minecraft Education is also a very robust offering and 99% of schools across the US have Microsoft licenses sort of built into their school ecosystem as it were. And sort of tucked into that Microsoft license is a Minecraft Education license that schools can use. And so our goal there is to exploit that as it were and help all of these schools across the US use Minecraft Education more to teach students essentially how to make their own video games as a whole construct called game code within the Microsoft Education Universe. So that's very exciting. 

And then the other one that we got a couple of years ago is more focused on high school and the AP CSP. Talk about college prep again. That was designed by the College Board, the AP Computer Science Principles course, which was the second because the first one was the AP CSA, which was a little more high level, perhaps a little more theoretical. The AP CSP was designed to attract more black and brown students to the STEM fields. And one of the markers of that course is that 50% of the grade or the course essentially is project-based learning, meaning you are making something. You are not just learning how to code, or you're not just learning the theory, you are making something. And of course, where do we come in? Well, we've created a course for the AP CSP called Game On, where you're making your own original video game. And so that's been a couple of years into that and they're getting some great results. 

So we don't just serve students directly, which is of course what we do, but we also train and partner with teachers across the country to integrate it into the curriculum where the students are at every day, five days a week, and try and get it embedded into the system.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Digital games obviously newer, but the OG games, Cynthia, as you said, learning has been embedded in our lives. Obviously gaming has been embedded in our lives as a way to learn for a really long time. Is this a conversation that comes up at Hasbro, you know, how do we make games where people learn? Is learning a foundational principle of gaming in general, how you make games, how you think about games, the value proposition of those games? Right, because there's so many skills that we learn from them. Is this a central conversation that you're having all the time?

Cynthia Williams: I think one of the places we have it the most frequently is within our Dungeons & Dragons organization. We partnered with Young Minds Inspiring to create classroom curriculum based on the learnings that we'd seen from people playing Dungeons & Dragons. We met a phenomenal educator named Kade Wells, who had created curriculum that would meet his school system's criteria and was using it in his classroom to phenomenal results. We continue to partner with him. Some of you may have seen him in a D&D panel with us at Games for Change Festival in New York City this past summer. He'll also be joining us at the South by Southwest EDU program, where we'll be doing a similar panel. 

But what we saw is not only does Dungeons & Dragons encourage people to learn to read, it teaches them resilience, it teaches them social skills, it teaches them to learn to express who they actually are to people, to understand consequences to actions. And so we've partnered with Young Minds Inspiring to create curriculum that is shared free of charge for school systems, for fourth graders and up. And thus far we've reached 16 million teachers, parents, kids, to outstanding results. The teachers are coming back and asking for more because they're just seeing such high engagement levels from their students. 

So we've also started offering the components you need to run an after-school program and they tell us they sell out, they get full as fast as they can find someone to lead the program. So I think it's a matter of when you can capture someone's imagination and they're learning core skills at the same time. It's just a win-win environment in the field of education. And so we're super excited about what's happening with that and about our partnership with Urban Arts. We love what they're doing. And so our game designers will often work with their participants and show them here's what we do and how we do it so they can get some of that real-world experience. And we're delighted to be partnering with Urban Arts, because it's having such great results.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Is that the crux of the partnership of Philip and Cynthia? You've got students, Philip, they need that real-world experience or real-world mentorship. You pair them or in some way you pair them up with somebody at Hasbro who's developing and they mentor them. How does it work, the partnership?

Cynthia Williams: I'd say there are two parts to it. We have a Hasbro foundation that is committed to working around play initiatives. And we partner with Urban Arts as part of our Playmakers Initiative, which is about funding people to learn to be game designers. We're working primarily with their post-secondary educational opportunities. And we offer Game Design 101 workshops to bring them in so they can learn to design and develop games.

Philip Courtney: Yeah, our ultimate goal, as you've heard, we start with middle school, then by the time it's high school, then there's a very sort of path to college access path, sort of three-year path. But once they matriculate to college, then we stay in touch with our alumni. Our ultimate goal on the other end of the spectrum is to be like that diverse talent pipeline for companies like Hasbro, right? We hope that in the future that Hasbro will look upon us and our alumni as potential employees.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact. I'm sure that will happen. And I do want to bring this up though, you guys, because we're talking about gaming and training and hard skills and soft skills and college and college readiness. You know, one of the things that's happening within our industry of higher education is the public sentiment around a degree is in the decline. You know, the public doesn't trust universities as much as they used to. You know, different camps on whether a college degree still has value and should you go get a degree, should you not get a degree, are there other post-secondary pathways you could take? What do you see? You're working with all types of businesses, both Urban Arts and Hasbro. And Cynthia, I'll start with you. What do you see in this space, this conversation around college, no college, degree, no degree? It's still such a hot debate.

Cynthia Williams: I would say for the first part, the way we talk about it is in our job descriptions, for example, either you have the degree or you have the relevant experience to do the job. So you don't have to have the degree. I think a degree does show your persistence, your ability to complete a goal. I think the really hard part is if you choose not to go the college route to get a degree, it's how do you get that experience? I came from rural North Carolina and it was not a place that was abounding with opportunities like it is here in Seattle, where I am. For me, a college degree and then a master's degree was my path out and path towards opportunity. So I probably have a personal bias.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Everybody does. That's why it's such a hot debate.

Cynthia Williams: It is. But you know, a lot of great tech companies on the West Coast aren't requiring them. I think it's a matter of how do you find your path to getting the opportunity if you choose not to get the degree?

Philip Courtney: Yeah, I think that's the key. Should I just jump in there?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, absolutely. Are you kidding me? No, I'm waiting.

Philip Courtney: So our program is a college access college prep program because of the students we serve and the data is still very clear that having a college degree, especially if you come from a low-income community is better. However, do I believe that that's the only way to do it? No. 

We've designed a program that is obviously college-focused and we found this niche where, firstly, also game design undergraduate degrees and Cynthia, we were talking about this and that's a master's degree now. What was the master's degree? Where was that being offered? The new one?

Cynthia Williams: Yeah, Duke University is now offering a master's in game design, game development in their engineering school. And we're just hugely excited about it.

Philip Courtney: It is partly because I come from North Carolina, but I am just going to say we got a couple others besides Duke, you know, to get in the game. But in the undergraduate space, it's a fast-growing degree, right? Game design undergraduate degree is a fast-growing field where more and more undergraduate degrees are being offered. Actually, we are partnered with New York City. It was four years in the making, but we just launched in partnership with City College in New York, part of the CUNY system, the first-ever undergraduate public option game design degree. So it's not a private college. You can go there. You can have an affordable education. You can graduate without debt without getting all those big scholarships. It's tech without debt. 

So I would love to run an organization, a company, I'd love to run Urban Arts one day where we have a college prep program, right? Because I'm never going to tell one of our students, you don't need to go to college. That's not my job to do that. Right. However, we hear that from some of our students. We do not have the infrastructure currently to be able to provide a post-secondary pathway, a workforce development pathway alongside that. And that's what I think is very important, what Cynthia said. Like if it's not college, you have to have a very, very thought out, rigorous plan of how you're gonna get there. And there's a lot of innovation that's gonna happen in that space. I'm excited about it. I hope Urban Arts, if we're talking in three to five years from now has that other pathway. But it's definitely a watch this space kind of thing. But I still believe and I, you know, people disagree that for the students that we serve, a college degree is still currently, you know, the best way to get where you're going.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, you know, it's, it's, really, it's such an interesting discussion, especially when you talk to folks like yourselves, because you know, in higher ed, which I am a part of higher education, I really believe in a college degree or else I wouldn't work in higher education. I would find something else to do. We understand degrees. We all do right. You know that there's an associate degree. And if you go on beyond that, you get a bachelor's degree. And if you go on beyond that, you get a master's degree. So although there's lots of traditionalism built into that, we do as a populace understand how that works, it steps forward and so on. There's a big question in the U.S. why we can't understand the three-year bachelor's degree, which UK does very well, but I think we're getting to that. 

The credentialing space, there's like more than a million credentials. I've joked on this podcast all the time. It's like my cousin Vinnie, you know, he's slinging your greatest, your next real estate class and you're going to stack this credential has no meaning to anybody else. And so it's going to take organizations like Urban Arts or Hasbro to start offering things that the organization who's offering shows the value of it. Google is a good example of that. Right. You have a Google certificate. You understand the value of Google as a brand. So you think, you know, you're going to get that. But that's what makes it so confusing. So you go back to Cynthia when you look at a resume and you go, what are all these credentials and how do they stack and which one has meaning, which one doesn't? It makes it very confusing. And for the person who's hiring, who probably has a college degree, there's always a built-in bias, which is what makes this all so confusing and so personal.

But there are many students, Philip, and you would know this too, Cynthia, that are wondering how to, maybe college isn't right for them right away, but it's later. And so we're starting to see more adult students. We're starting to see second career individuals go back to school and start a new career. Is that a demographic you serve in general? Are you focused more on the K-12 pipeline to college? And Cynthia, do you see in the stuff you're doing at Hasbro adult students? Or is it more the traditional student?

Philip Courtney: Well, we just answer quickly, we serve K through, we are, you know, our students are sort of, you know, well, now with middle school is a bit different, but through, you know, the age of 24, right? So, yeah, we're not sort of in the adult space.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Right, 24 starts to get there. Right. Yeah, it does. Cynthia?

Cynthia Williams: Because we don't necessarily focus on helping people develop skills from high school to entering the workforce. I do think I'll call out what I see happening in the digital gaming space in particular that is helping people achieve some of those skills if they are choosing not to go that route of the traditional program. Philip mentioned Minecraft Education, so people are learning to build games within platforms like Minecraft and Roblox, and there are a multitude of others. And it's not that hard to get into the Unreal Engine, which is by Epic Games or Unity's Engine, and learn to code. And we're seeing people who are going to college but have been coding in those programs from very early ages have much more advanced skills. 

Coming out of college, there's a young man on one of my teams, one of our game studios who I think had been coding in Unreal since he was 12. That is amazing. We hired him from Epic Games. So that helped him enter into Epic. And I think he's going to be a rock star of the video game industry throughout his career.

Philip Courtney: Yeah, our students do Unity as well. And to answer your earlier question, there's a whole progression in Unity too, but there's a whole progression in Unity, where you can, you can gain and they're not teaching a lot of colleges not teaching, like our students are alumni even doing it because that is not being taught in college, but there's a progression of Unity skill and Unity certified user exams and then programmer and all these other levels where if you get to the end, even without a college degree, you're pretty employable.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Back to your point, there are parts of the gaming world that colleges and universities are not offering. Can we not keep up with it? Is it advancing too fast? Is it just not something that we as an industry think about embedding in a program? What do you think?

Philip Courtney: I'm not a college expert because I'm a K-12 expert, but I do know that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We're not experts. That's the way the industry works.

Philip Courtney: I think there's only so much real estate in the curriculum, I think, number one. Yeah, I don't know. I see more colleges using Epic Games than Unity. We do a lot of Unity and we do a lot of it in the high school space. It's more accessible and the entry point. It's just very accessible for young people to start off with. Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's catching up. I mean, Unity and Epic are competing for that space, right? They're competing for that college space and that mind share. And from what I've heard from some of the colleges we work with, they're either a Unity one or an Epic college, you know?

But I did hear from someone who shall remain nameless that it actually doesn't matter that it matters that the students develop these skills and do these certifications. But whether you're doing 20% Epic and 80% Unity or 20% Unity and 80% Epic, you're going to end up kind of with the requisite skill set to be where you need to be. 

Cynthia, how about you? Same? Similar, you think?

Cynthia Williams: I would say throughout my professional career, I've had universities coming to me and asking about what skills do you really need in the real world that we're not providing yet? It feels like there's always a chase going on to stay current. I also agree with Philip. It doesn't matter if you're learning to do this in Unity or Unreal. What really matters is that if you want a career in game design, is that you're starting to learn some of the principles of how that's done. You may end up at a game studio who has a proprietary engine and you have to learn to code in that, but it's those coding skills, the thinking about game design, narrative design, how sound is used in games, all of that starts playing into building out your portfolio of skills that will make you attractive to someone in a game studio who is looking for that skill.

Philip Courtney: Yeah, what we're hearing from our...

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead.

Philip Courtney: What we're hearing from our... so this degree we created in CUNY we have an EAB is called an educational advisory board made up of people from Rockstar and Hasbro and and what we're hearing from the employers is actually the most important thing aside even from these whether it's Unity or Unreal Engine is the portfolio, which Cynthia mentioned. Having that portfolio, it's showing your train of thought and your skills as you develop them and the creativity. And that's where we've evolved our high school program to making sure that, yes, we're teaching the skills, but really the students... What sets the students apart, especially to get into these competitive colleges with these scholarships, is the portfolio because there is a huge amount of applicants for game design degrees who've never made a game before because actually making games is pretty hard and it takes a while and there are many, you know, and that's fine. But what sets our students apart is they all come with a very robust portfolio. And I think that continues to resonate in the world of work.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Tell them like it is. Okay. What about AI? Didn't that hit? Didn't that really hit? No, I mean, how does seriously like gamers, anybody who's developing game, right? AI comes along, you would think that this is... this is an ongoing conversation at Urban Arts. What about AI? It's... it's... it's what do we think about?

Philip Courtney: Well, so it's... we launched our program, as you heard, we're at the intersection of arts and tech, right? Students learning how to code, they're also learning all these art forms. And what we've seen over the last six years, even before the AI conversation, there's always you know, how long does it take to learn how to code at the level you need to in order to make the game? How long does it take to master the music or the storytelling, all of these things? And there's always this sort of a battle of real estate, that there's not enough time. 

In talking to our students and surveying them, the most recent feedback we got before the sort of like about a year ago was like, there's just too much coding. And there's so much debugging and coding. It's like so much of coding is create the code and then you have to figure out where the mistakes are. And so what I'm excited about with AI is that, and we're right in the middle of it, right? Because we're actually teaching students how to do this every day. And with the advent of AI, how things are going to change. What I'm hoping is going to happen, and this is what was also expressed by our students, is where did the art go? We want the art forms. We want the creativity part. We're spending like 70% of the time coding and debugging. So I'm hoping that AI helps us to accelerate that and bring the arts back and find that balance. I think also with the AI, there's just more importance now, I think Cynthia alluded to this, on language. Knowing about language and building. If you're asking the AI to build something for you, you're going to need to be much more clear with your language. So...

I think what we're going to see from our program is more art forms, more language, more storytelling. Certainly the coding is front and center, but hopefully there's less, you know, sort of debugging and busy work in the coding and can just be accelerated more.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, I want you guys to know that I love this conversation. In fact, I'm going to hang out with you until the end of time. So get ready. I've got your email. So you're going to hear from me all the time now. You know, no, I want to, you've got a higher education audience here. We have a lot of presidents. High-level administrators listen to this podcast. What do we want to say about the future of education, the power of play? Gaming? Let's look from your perspective Cynthia. We'll start with you. What do you see for... but what do you want to say open mic? What do you want to say about the power of play and gaming and and then what do you see for the future of education?

Cynthia Williams: I had an opportunity to speak at Games for Change Festival at the UN this summer. And one of my key points was that play is a human need. This is not frivolous. This is not a way to waste time. There's so much connection and community built through gaming, but this conversation is really about the educational benefits of both game development and playing games and all the skills that can be built there. If I were appealing based on opportunity, and Philip alluded to this earlier, video games are played by 3 billion people around the world. Including me. I would argue that games in general are played by all 7 billion people on the planet.

And the games industry is now the largest and fastest growing form of entertainment on the planet. If you aren't including game design and development in your educational curriculum, you are robbing your students of an opportunity to prepare to be in one of the fastest growing industries that we have.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I like that point. Thank you. Philip, over to you. Open mic, what do you want to say about Urban Arts, power play, future of education?

Philip Courtney: The problem we're trying to solve in education is there's a huge amount of disengagement, right? And education, you know, especially in underfunded schools, where education just can be really pretty dry. And so, you know, Cynthia talks about the power of play and gaming as an educational tool. So I think that's huge. You know, this, this, what we call gaming pathways in New York, which is this public option undergraduate game design course that came out of the fact that we were graduating more and more students, who really wanted to go out there and study video games and not all of them got into the, you know, the NYU's or USC's and many of our students do, but not all right. And so the ones that went into the CUNY system didn't, they had to study something else. They had to study some sort of other course in parallel with a bit of gaming throwing in or, you know. And so we saw an entrepreneurial opportunity there, right, which was that there was not, you know, there's not one undergraduate program in CUNY offering a four-year bachelor's degree. So I would say to first to say to presidents like, they're students, and they probably have already and because game design undergraduate degrees are on the rise, but, you know, listen to your people and the students you're serving and your incoming students and see what their appetite for this is because my guess is it would be huge.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, anything that you can turn, put game of, and we used to talk about gamification and everything back a couple of years ago in the higher ed and then everything became gamified in some way and that's people get motivated by that. Your gym memberships are based on that. You know, they throw the heart monitor around you and put up on the board, how you're doing against the person running on the treadmill next to you. It's all about gaming.

Philip Courtney: Right. It really is. Well, game is the teacher. The game is the teacher.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yes, it is. It is the future. There's going to be the teacher, the teacher.

Philip Courtney: I was saying the game is the teacher. Right.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Anyway, whatever. Doesn't matter. No, I think you're right. I want to say and I brought this up on the podcast before, too. Anybody who games knows that if I'm just talking about digital gaming for a minute and you go and you can't beat a level, you try it over and over and over again until you do beat it. And you've learned a little bit of something every single time to eventually pass it. That comes with a heck of a lot of endorphins and dopamine that come in when you finally get that done, right? And it makes you feel accomplished. And that's the whole idea. The game is the teacher and I've had two teachers here today with me. Thank you guys for being here. Ladies and gentlemen, he's Philip Courtney, CEO of Urban Arts. She is Cynthia Williams, President of Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Gaming. I hope you guys had a good time. I'm keeping to the hard stop time here like we're one minute away. So thank you guys so much for coming on.

Philip Courtney and Cynthia Williams: Thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just Ed-upped.