Why Aldi Agaj Builds Games With Scientists AND Teachers

·32 min·3 clips

Aldi Agaj reveals why his first educational game company, Green Science Games, failed despite its noble mission.

The episode begins with host Rob Alvarez introducing Aldi Agaj as the CEO of AAK Telescience and Alter Learning, an educational gaming platform. Aldi shares his background, including starting two companies remotely during COVID-19, which now involve 862 people across 18 countries. He recounts the story of his first game company, Green Science Games, which failed because it focused on a single game about environmental education and didn't attract investors. Aldi reflects that he learned to consider market demands and investor perspectives from this experience. He defines success not in financial terms but as the ability to collaborate with hundreds of scientists, doctors, child development specialists, and teachers to create educational content. Aldi details the game development process at Alter Learning, which involves creating Game Design Documents (GDDs) from scientific research and involving multidisciplinary teams to ensure educational accuracy and age-appropriateness. He emphasizes that no game is created without a scientist, a teacher, and an engineer working together, often in groups of 16 or more people per game. Aldi shows a screen share of a collaborative meeting and a Kanban board to illustrate this process. When asked for recommendations, Aldi suggests inviting scientists as future podcast guests to share insights on gamification and science communication. He recommends reading unfinished books like J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion to encourage imagination and personal decision-making. Aldi identifies his superpower as never giving up and his favorite game as volleyball, which he relates to teamwork in business. He contrasts this with his dislike of golf, highlighting personal preferences in games. The episode concludes with Aldi sharing contact information for Alter Learning and AAK Telescience, inviting collaborations and affiliate partnerships.

As heard by us

A grounded look at designing educational games that grow from simple early lessons into high-school biology.

Professor Game frames educational game design as a problem of scale: one system has to welcome a five-year-old into a simple 2D or 3D game, then keep building toward material fit for an 18-year-old.

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Why you'd press play

You want to follow an education-game idea that starts simple enough for a five-year-old and keeps adding difficulty, detail, and school topics all the way into high-school biology.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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