Why Shared Experiences Help Us Learn: Andrew Cross on Learning From Your World
Technology takes a lot of the blame for pulling people away from each other and away from the world in front of them. Some of it has earned that. But it raises a better question: what if technology were built to do the opposite?
That is where Andrew Cross, founder and CEO here at Goosechase, starts his conversation with Christina Wenman on her podcast, Learning From Your World. The episode, "How Shared Experiences Help Us Learn and Connect," is out now.
What Andrew and Christina Talk About
The conversation covers play, memory, and the gap between telling people something and letting them live it:
- Why an experience can teach more than simply handing over information
- What it looks like to design technology that sends people back out into the real world
- How to make everyday activities more creative, engaging, and worth remembering
- The story behind Goosechase and how it got started
Why Experiences Stick Better Than Information
Anyone who has run a training session knows the pattern. You build the deck, you present the material, people nod along, and two weeks later almost none of it survives. The information was fine. The delivery method was the problem.
Experiences work differently because they ask something of the person. You cannot passively receive a challenge. You have to move, decide, make something, or talk to someone to complete it, and that effort is what makes the thing stick. It is the same reason most people remember a field trip better than the unit that preceded it. We wrote more about the mechanics of this in our breakdown of what makes an interactive Experience work, and about the research side in converting content into learning experiences.
The Question Behind Goosechase
Andrew also lands on a challenge that sits at the center of how we think about our work: stop accepting "how it's always been done," and start asking "what would make this a better experience?"
It is a small reframe with a long tail. Applied to a staff training, a fundraiser, a first week of classes, or a community event, that one question tends to expose how much of the agenda exists purely out of habit. Everyone shows up, sits down, absorbs some information, and leaves. Attendance gets recorded. Not much gets remembered.
Participation is the part that sticks, and participation is not the same thing as attendance. It is why we build Missions instead of slide decks, and why our classroom activities that get students off their screens start from the same place: give people something to do, not something to watch.
The Forest Preserve District of Will County has been running this play for four years. Their Take It Outside Challenge started as a way to get locals onto trails they had never heard of, and it has since grown into a year-round Experience with more than 2,000 active participants. The number that matters most: their participation rate now tops 80%, meaning most people who sign up go on to actually complete Missions. That is the difference between an audience and a community, and it is the practical version of what Andrew is describing in the episode.
