Interview with Peter Maggs: Head Strategist of Kahootz

Interview with Peter Maggs  (Head of New Media at ATCF)

(The full version of the interview can be read here)

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your experience working in the media industry?

I’m the head of New Media at the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. I come from an education background originally. I was a secondary teacher in a Victorian school for ten years. I started using technology more in my teaching and when the internet kicked off in the mid-90’s I started doing quite a bit of work—at that time I was teaching in country Victoria and I started getting kids online and schools I was teaching in. And I suppose I became one of the pioneers of doing that so one thing led to another and I ended up being a consultant for the Victorian Education Department helping other schools use the internet in a way that was constructive. I came to the Australian Children’s Television Foundation in 1997, working as an education specialist. They were working on a range of New Media projects—New Media meaning digital or online projects that were about trying to get kids to create their own media.

I have been working at the ACTF ever since and for the last four years I have headed up the department that oversees New Media. Our major project has been the Kahootz 3D animation project which we have developed and built in-house and is being used by over 2,800 schools around the country.

''Can you describe the process of the development of Kahootz? What sort of research went into the software/was it based on any exisiting media program?''

Initially, Kahootz, the development started probably 2001/2002 and that involved getting a team of probably a dozen. Kahootz 2, as it was called, which was the 3D version that included 3D modellers to create the 3D models as in the people, the animals and the buildings and the 3D worlds that would be in the Kahootz software. We had our own interface people who designed the graphic-user interface that would be front-end of the program. Obviously we had 2 or 3 programmers who were doing the back-end. Kahootz was continually developed into lingo code, developed lingo code. And we had other people doing testing for us, some people who were doing some graphic elements, etcetera. But the core team was really 3D modellers, 2 or 3 programmers, an interface person and then a couple of people who were involved in the testing process.

Kahootz 3 which we released only about a month ago has been an 18-month development process that I have overseen with the team here, which we are now down to a team of 5-6 people. We still have a programmer, Tim, who was the major programmer in the original Kahootz. He flew solo on Kahootz 3 and did all the programming but we outsourced the interface design to a company called…they done the new interface. We outsourced much of the 3D model development to half a dozen different young 3D modellers who did various different components of the new library, the new animals and people and transport etcetera. And we also got a company to develop the in-built ‘help’ application that you can access from the menu and it steps you through the different functions of Kahootz. So our core development team for Kahootz 3 was about literally 4 or 5 in-house people but with 3 or 4 outsourced companies providing different elements. We also added a substantial sound capability of Kahootz, so we had SBS and another company developing new sounds for Kahootz which included different language, people speaking in Japanese, Mandarin, Indonesian plus a whole range of ambient atmosphere sounds that are incorporated into the sound library. So that was an 18-month process and then quite a long 6-month testing process. Quite often with software development, the easy bit is building it and the last 2% is testing it and getting the bugs out which could take quite some time. We finished all of that at the end of March and Kahootz 3 was delivered to all Victorian government schools; I think it was the last week of March or the first week of April as part of a contract that we have with the Victorian department, where all Victorian government schools will be receiving Kahootz 3 they already had Kahootz 2. So that was quite a big thing for us to get that finished and out to those schools.

Was Kahootz created as a response to changing audience expectations?

Kahootz was philosophically driven by what we thought was the need for kid’s to have a fairly generic set of tools that would let them make their own animations, their own 3D stories, create their own movies, do blue screen techniques; fairly simply and intuitively and it had to be something used by young primary kids through to secondary kids rather than just being a high-end piece of software that only savvy seven year olds can use. The idea of Kahootz came out of that desire to create something simple, intuitive, but would let kid’s create media and then have a community based around that, an online community, where they can share and exchange the content they created.

''How does Kahootz empower young children to become storytellers? And how important is it for children to be active in storytelling?''

I think extremely important. I think, from a development point of view for kids, the ability to tell their own story and not just tell them but also share them with other kids, get a sense of engagement and interaction with other kids around their own stories is important. I think it stimulates creativity. I think from a self-esteem perspective, it is important for kids to be able to see that their stories are being viewed, shared and inter-acted with by other kids. So there’s a whole range of benefits both from a skill development perspective in terms of kid’s creative skills—which could be about animation or just a generic storytelling narrative skills from a literacy perspective. But also from the sharing of the content, I think there’s a whole interesting dynamic that occurs once kids actually put their stuff out there and other kids respond to it, engage with it, provide feed-back I think there’s a whole range of developmental skills and also self-esteem that is generated once kids actually are actively creating their own, whether it’s animation, stories, movies, I think that’s very important.

How does the online forum space encourage universal collaboration?

I’ll distinguish between different types of collaboration because there’s the online collaboration—where a class might decide to upload their work. When a school buys Kahootz, they get their own Kahootz website—we create a website for them—but they can then create what are called a ‘project spaces’ which is basically little depositories where they can, if they want to, upload their work and either share that with other Kahootz classrooms, which could be schools around Australia or even in the 15 countries overseas where schools have bought Kahootz, or they can make them private spaces, an enclosed space where the class might use; there is collaboration going on using that. Whilst it is a relatively small percentage of schools that do that—might only be, say 5%—nevertheless we find some really interesting things get uploaded.

The other aspect, which is probably not an online exchange aspect, but if you go into a classroom of kid’s who are using Kahootz software, there will be an enormous amount of collaboration exchange going on within the classroom. Kids don’t just sit quietly and use Kahootz, normally someone will discover a technique or skill and then next thing you have is 5 or 6 kids huddled around the one monitor saying ‘how did you do that’? So there’s a lot of skill sharing and in a sense collaborative learning going on within the classroom. Kid’s constantly want to know what some else has done, they want to know where other kid’s found something…so there’s a lot of sharing of the skill development process amongst the kids. I would count that as a very significant collaborative learning element.

How easily has Kahootz been intergrated into the classroom?

It’s early days; it’s literally only a few weeks, probably a question I can answer definitely in 3-6 months time. Certainly the feedback is that most of the schools that were already actively using the previous version, Kahootz 2, were chomping at the bit to get Kahootz 3 because it had new library and there were a range of new functions in particular. Probably the one that they’re most excited about was in the previous version of Kahootz you could not record your own voice directly into you Kahootz story, whereas in the new version, Kahootz 3, you can. So it means from a narrative perspective you can actually narrate the story or you could speak in a different language—so for language teachers they could use it—but it means that kids can have their own voice and can actually be their own character inside the stories. So that is something that their all incredibly excited about getting, so we knew there was a lot of pent up anticipation by the existing Kahootz 2 schools waiting for the new version.

What sort of media user is Kahootz creating for the future?

One of the things that we hope to do with Kahootz is that Kahootz has been built based on Director’s lingo code, and Director is professional level animation software used by people in the animation industry. We created Kahootz in a way that we hope introduces kids to the base level skills of animation, in terms of working with 3D, Kahootz 3 now has a timeline aspect—the same ones you would be using in Director—while it is obviously simplified so that 7 to 9 year olds can use it. But in terms of the concept: key frame based, time based animation program…Kahootz is starting to introduce kids to those concepts so we see that potentially it is providing a more interesting and engaging way the skills and concepts that might lead kid’s onto a whole range of other creative applications down the track that could lead down the graphics art area, or animation—so we think that we are giving them, hopefully, sort of a training wheels that would lead onto more higher-end programs.

What do you see as being the role of digital media in education?

Kid’s now want to be creating their own digital media, whereas 20 years ago, no one probably knew what digital media was, media was probably something that a media teacher went a got a big clunky camera and you filmed something and then you used some big clunky machines and expensive software and ended up with a video or a movie and it was very controlled. Obviously now given the ubiquity of digital media from hand-held to mobile phones, to kids with i-pods or whatever they’re using, for kids that is their pervasive part of their day-to-day lives. So taking a photo on your phone and sending them to your friends is no longer a big deal, it’s just what you do on a daily basis. In an educational perspective the issue now isn’t about hardware or software, it’s about how do you utilise the fact that kids are creating and using and sharing digital media on a daily basis within their own peer group. How do you make sense of that educationally? How do you add value to it? How do you give kids more skills to do more interesting stuff? Because the kids are already doing all of that, so the challenge is adding value to the elements of what they are already doing; whether that be developing better literacy skills through podcasts.

As a media producer at the ACTF, do you find now that you have to extend your shows from TV to other media platforms to engage with audiences?

It’s very much at the forefront. I think that anything you do now when making media in sort of that holistic sense, you’re always thinking about—and they talk about the 360 media meaning the online aspect and what other formats can this media be shown—there wouldn’t be many people in our days producing television or film that aren’t thinking in terms of other platforms and other formats in that digital media. So yes, it’s a natural part of any starting phase when you’re coming up with a concept for a TV or film, how else could this be utilised what other formats could it be shown, what other ways can people interact with this? Otherwise it will be a very outdated mode of operating what you’re talking about just TV and then plonk a website as an after thought later on.