Interview with Mike Sego

Director of Engineering, Facebook-Summit Schools Partnership

From an early age, Mike has been fascinated by video games and their ability to create emotionally engaging experiences. He interned on the Sims team during college and built the popular game Fluff Friends as a side-project when he was on the Gmail team. He became CEO of the virtual world company, Gaia Online, and after 3 years, he left to explore ideas in education.

He took a tour of Summit Public Schools and found their classroom and approach unique and compelling. With a single engineer they had built tools that allowed students to take more ownership of their own learning process. Around the same time, Mark Zuckerberg offered Summit resources to help develop and scale the software, and Mike joined Facebook to build and manage the engineering team and Summit partnership.

The key to Summit is Personalized Learning. Each student is working towards their personal, long-term goals. After a student sets goals, a teacher helps the student outline a plan of specific actions to get there. Students pursue their work at their own pace, and use the software to help with the entire learning process. Summit runs a network of nine schools in California and Washington. Nineteen more schools are piloting the program as a part of Summit Basecamp.

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Where did you grow up and what kind of school experience did you have? What kind of learner were you and what got you really excited?

I grew up in the suburbs of LA and went to the Arcadia Public schools. My dad was a fifth grade teacher for 37 years. As a kid, my dad would let us ‘play school’ and I would help grade papers and things like that. I was always in and around classrooms. Education was an important part of my upbringing.

As the youngest of five kids, I was pretty competitive, and Arcadia was an intense academic community. My friends’ parents pushed them to take as many AP classes as possible and study for the SAT. I got caught up in that myself, and became your typical high school gunner. At the same time, I didn’t really have a plan for what I wanted to do in life.

How did that change? What attracted you to computer science?

When I went to college, I started taking courses in subjects I had enjoyed in high school, political science and philosophy. But I didn’t get good grades, and it was frustrating. I had always done well in school and now I was struggling. It may have been a fixed mindset problem.

Computer Science was the hot thing to do at Stanford in 1999. So I gave it a try, and it clicked immediately. I loved that I could take an idea and turn that into a finished product people could see and use. Growing up, I had been obsessed with video games. After taking intro CS, I realized I could become a game developer, and that drove me through the next phase of my career.

I was passionate about ‘The Sims’, and applied for an internship at Electronic Arts to join ‘The Sims Online’ team.

Was there something in particular that attracted you to ‘The Sims’?

It was such an incredibly emotionally engaging experience. Your Sim people really mattered to you. You genuinely wanted to make them happy. Moreover, people who didn’t typically like games loved ‘The Sims’. My siblings, who weren’t gamers, got into it. I liked that you could reach such a broad range of people on an emotional level.

What did you end up doing after graduation?

After college, I went to work full time at Electronic Arts on The Sims. Eventually the team size started feeling too big for me. I wanted a role where I felt more ownership and could learn more. Some of my friends went to Google and I followed them.

I joined Google and worked on Gmail. The teams were smaller and more empowered, and I liked that. At Google as well as at Facebook, there’s a sense that all individuals should be leaders. You’re not just an employee. No one’s going to tell you exactly what you should be doing. You’re expected to figure out where you can have the most impact. Your manager’s job is to help you, not tell you what to do. I loved that.

Working on the Gmail team was great, and I became a tech-lead and managed part of the team. On the side I continued to tinker around with building games, and one of them, Fluff Friends, became very popular. I left Google to work on it full-time and grew it to 10 million users. After about a year I sold Fluff Friends to SGN.

After you sold the game company, what did you decide to pursue next?

I wanted to continue working on games and joined Gaia Online, a web-based virtual world, as their Chief Product Officer, and within a year became the CEO.

The social gaming landscape was very competitive. One of the tougher challenges was balancing the business need of creating something successful with the creative passions of the people in the company, myself included. It really pushed me as a manager, and I learned a ton.

However, over time, I enjoyed game development less and less. Most of our conversations had become focused on maximizing revenue per user or lowering user acquisition cost. The design process wouldn’t start with discussing how to create delight, but instead we’d evaluate ideas for their revenue potential. This made sense for the business, but for myself personally, it strayed away from what had gotten me into games in the first place. I knew I should probably find something else to do.

I took a hard turn back to my roots to explore education. I wondered if I could I use my background in games to build emotionally engaging experiences for students. What parts of the psychology of motivation — something we thought about a lot in game development — could help foster a love of learning?

When you were thinking about education at that time, was the motivation component central to your thinking?

It was. I thought through the lens of motivation and games. My general thesis was, “I don’t know much about education yet, but I know about game development. Maybe game-based learning could be interesting.”

I explored a lot of these ideas with Josh Wiseman, who was also thinking about opportunities in K-12 Education. Together we read books, kicked around ideas, and visited some local schools. Actually visiting classrooms gave me a much better grounding. I learned more about specific challenges educators face and what a great educational experience might look like.

One of those visits was to Summit Public Schools. I was incredibly impressed. With the help of a single great engineer, Sam Strasser, they had built a personalized learning platform. It was basic, but aimed to link together the whole academic experience. Summit gained a lot of attention for their innovative approach, and was hosting tours non-stop. Other schools were eager to try out some of what Summit was doing, and Summit wanted to leverage its work for broader impact.

After the tour I thought, “This is what more schools should look like.” Mark Zuckerberg visited soon after and he had a similar reaction. Summit needed more engineers to further develop and scale the platform, and Mark thought Facebook could help. I joined to build this team within Facebook, and partner with Summit to improve the personalized learning platform and make it available to more schools.

In addition to the software, what were the elements of Summit that got you most excited?

When I was originally exploring education ideas, I focused a lot on game-based motivation: Not everyone is excited about learning, but most kids spend an inordinate amount of time trying to achieve goals in games, getting a high score or things like that. I thought that by making school feel more like a game, students might be more motivated to work hard.

As I talked to different educators, I realized this idea was too focused on extrinsic motivation, and it wasn’t connected to something meaningful in students’ lives that would lead to a long term shift in behavior.

What I saw at Summit was an approach that helped students understand the “why” behind everything they did in school. One key to motivation is having meaningful long-term goals and a feeling of tangible progress. At the start of the year, students meet with their parents and a teacher, who will serve as their mentor, and discuss what they want to do in their life. The program works backwards from that meeting, with specific short-term milestones they’ll reach to stay on track towards their overarching ambitions. This connection between daily actions and achieving your life’s dreams was more powerful than ideas around putting avatars or other game-mechanics into school.

What I’ve observed at Summit is a focus on building skills, not meeting arbitrary deadlines. There are no points docked for something being late. The notion of punitive deadlines runs counter to the purpose of school. Students should work at a pace that is right for them. In a traditional system, time is fixed and learning is variable. Summit is working to build a system where learning is fixed, and time can be variable.

That’s where it clicked for me. School isn’t about getting a high score or even just getting a good grade. It’s about learning how to learn, and preparing to reach your goals in life.

That’s pretty profound. That’s was a big shift.

Yeah. Summit felt like an implementation of different ideas that I had only read about or seen as separate pieces. They brought them together into a cohesive academic experience.

You joined Facebook to help develop and lead this team. How have you defined your goal? What’s the focus of the project?

A lot of people at Facebook are excited about the potential of personalized learning. Through our partnership with Summit, we’ve seen how it can open up new opportunities for students and help them reach their full potential.

First, we’ve been working closely with Summit to improve the technology within their own schools. This means building in more functionality to help them refine, iterate, and develop their model. The close collaboration has been fantastic to make a lot of progress really quickly.

The second goal is to expand personalized learning to many more schools. That’s really hard. It takes much more than using this software to offer an educational experience like Summit’s. It takes teachers who deeply understand how to support an environment where students drive their own learning. It takes parents who are involved in helping students continue their learning outside of 8am to 3pm. It takes changes to school schedules. You can’t switch classes every 45 minutes and have space for deeper project-based learning. Many schools have real constraints that make this a challenge.

As a team, we have to both keep iterating to build the best possible experience, while always working towards ways to serve more and more schools with different challenges and constraints.

What are the things that you’ve been most surprised by? What’s turned out better than expected?

When we launched the Basecamp program to expand to schools outside of Summit, we wanted it to be a true test. An opportunity for us to learn. We needed to understand how well the model would work outside of Summit’s unique environment, whether it would succeed in a Texas suburb, rural Idaho, or big cities like New York and DC. We’re working with 19 schools representing different populations, regionally, urban/rural, different degrees of socioeconomic status, different degrees of English-language learners.

We were conservative, and expected maybe half the schools to fully embrace the model and decide to keep going. But after the first year, all of them plan to continue. In most cases, they’re also expanding program to more students within their schools.

That’s pretty remarkable. The Basecamp program requires a big change for a classroom. Teachers are no longer delivering content. Students use open-educational resources for their learning, work at their own pace, set long-term goals, and do weekly 1:1 mentoring check-ins. It’s encouraging to see the nearly all of the teachers who started in Basecamp continue to embrace the program.

During this first year, what’s been harder than expected for the schools that make the transition?

One thing we’ve heard is that, because the role of the teacher is pretty different in this model, it can be a challenging transition.

For many of our partner teachers, they’re accustomed to controlling the class, setting the pace and driving the lesson plans. This is a very different role. In this environment, the teacher needs to let students go. The focus is primarily on supporting students in setting their own goals.

When it doesn’t work right off the bat, there can be a reflex that says, “I know the solution here. I need to tell the kids what to do.” But that’s part of the transformation. The first several weeks or months can be very messy. Students may fumble through how to drive their own learning. It’s hard to help them over that hump. Teachers have to provide enough guidance, without giving them too much scaffolding.

As a teacher it’s probably hard to endure weeks of this in-between state.

Yes, it has been a challenging shift. In Summit’s experience, you see the benefits in the long-term, not the short-term. In the old model, you can tell every student what to study today, and most of them will do it. But when students work at their own pace, some will be off task. It’s really hard to trust that the long-term goals of students practicing self-direction habits are worth it.

Summit realized that they needed to equip students to learn on their own. Students need to be able to fail in a supportive environment. That’s where they still have an opportunity to learn these skills, and make mistakes with fewer consequences than when they go to college or careers.

It’s made me realize that a good education involves so much more than content. It’s learning how to learn, and it’s learning how to apply what you’re learning to build things and accomplish longer term goals.

Coming into this you probably had a set of perceptions about learning based on your experience as a student. How has that changed?

You definitely have to remove your own experience in school and as a learner if you’re going to support people who are very different from yourself.

Summit has 1:1 mentorship for students as core part of the program, it’s a weekly 10 minute meeting where teachers and students check-in. But when I started, I didn’t fully get it. Self-paced learning made perfect sense to me, and I fully understood how technology could support it, letting students take tests on demand. Project-based learning seemed cool, and I could mostly see how that would deepen knowledge. But the 1:1 mentor conversation, I didn’t fully appreciate that.

For me, those priorities are now flipped. I believe the more our program is able to facilitate students feeling cared for and understood, fully engaging in the weekly goal-setting and reflection cycle, the better prepared they’ll be for life. Yes, it’s really hard for software to help develop that coaching, feedback, and mentorship relationship between teachers and students, but it’s so important for us to figure out.

Last question. What guidance or advice would you give someone who’s thinking about going into education and technology?

Well, I probably spent too long exploring ideas and not enough time in classrooms. All those months reading every book and article on K-12 and trying out every EdTech product, rather than directly talking to and understanding educators, probably wasn’t well spent.

Instead, I’d recommend that you find the small handful of folks who are doing interesting and meaningful work that you believe in, and go talk to them. That might be an established company like AltSchool, Clever, Remind, or Khan Academy. There many interesting, early stage companies as well. Talk to the people there and see what resonates with you. And while you’re at it, without a doubt, spend time in schools. Understand teachers, and the challenges they face keeping track of all their students and giving quality feedback.

Technology is really only getting started in education, so if you have an idea in your head, just start building on it. Learn by doing, and grow your understanding by getting out there and building alongside real educators. There’s so much space for helping to define the tools that will help drive personalized learning, and so much interest from schools to adopt new approaches to better serve all students. A lot is going to happen over the next five years.

That’s awesome. Thank you.