Bottom-Line Performance

The gamification of learning is a hot, hot trend with great potential to improve the quality of learning experiences for adults – not just kids. In the corporate environment – where “rapid elearning” and the NEXT button now dominate – learning games offer a compelling difference in terms of user experience and results. We are sold on the value of games in learning, and we want to actively promote their use.

Our goal is to give readers basic knowledge of game design and how to get started with it. In the coming weeks, we will release portions of our upcoming paper, A Primer on Learning Game Design. Much like our previous paper, Lessons on mLearning, chunks will be made available on this blog. The paper (and our upcoming blog posts) will cover:

• • The What and the Why of Gamification
• • Mastering the Jargon of Game Design
• • What Makes for a Meaningful Game?
• • Getting Started at Creating Games
• • Getting Ideas for Games
• • Constraints that Affect Design
• • Play Testing Games – An Essential Step
• • When You Play Test…And You Find Out the Game Is Not Fun

Look for the first section, The What and the Why of Gamification, to be posted next week. To get you pumped about games, we’re starting with the END of our paper – where we give you references to check out. If these whet your appetite, visit again next week – or visit our website and download the white paper, which we’ll release next week with the blog post.

Have  fun poking through these game resources! If you have others – please feel free to share them via comments or send me the links on Twitter. I’ll re-tweet them out as well as share them in the blog.

References

Games to play

• • Knowledge Guru: http://www.TheKnowledgeGuru.com
• • Algebra game: http://www.dimensionu.com/dimu/home/uvideos.aspx?ref=top%20menu%20dimu
• • Marketing game: Getting the Glass: http://www.gettheglass.com/index2.html
• • Marketing game, Get it Ripe (Domino’s Pizza): http://more.dominos.com/games/?game=tomato&fb=0
• • Social justice/awareness: http://playspent.org/
• • Financial education: Moneytopia game: http://www.dodcommunitybank.com/home/resources/military_saves/moneytopia 
• • IT Hangman: http://www.blptraining.com/blp_development/walk_the_plank

White papers and books to read

• • “Game-based Learning: What it is. Why it works. Where it is going.”
  http://www.newmedia.org/game-based-learning–what-it-is-why-it-works-and-where-its-going.html 
• • “Marriott hopes to win with Facebook game:”
  http://www.workforce.com/section/software-technology/feature/marriott-hopes-win-facebook-game
• • Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos by Karl Kapp, Pfeiffer, 2007
• • What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy by James Paul Gee, Palgrave
  Macmillan, 2007
• • Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber,  Course Technology, 2009
• • Learning by Doing: A comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences by Clark Aldrich, Pfeiffer, 2005.

Knowledge Guru is a game engine we at Bottom-Line Performance have been developing for the past year. We’re chomping at the bit to release the game engine to people so they can create their own learning games…but we also want to gather as much test feedback as we can before finalizing the first release.

Knowledge Guru enables you to create a quiz-style, competitive game that provides an engaging way for employees to acquire “declarative knowledge” (e.g. learn the facts and apply those facts to specific scenarios).  The game design deliberately cultivates information retention by repetition. You have to deliver three scrolls related to each game topic to earn topic mastery. You do this by answering questions within each topic. You can’t unlock the Knowledge Guru “grab bag” until you master all the topics. The more you retain, the more points and achievements you earn. Game play is fast – which means employees can play when they have as little as 5 minutes of available time. The gamification of the learning is designed to keep people coming back to play more.

We just completed a closed beta test, and we’re extremely happy with the great feedback we received.  It’s time to open it up and allow a wide array of random testers to play our test game  – and give us additional feedback on the game engine design.

So – now is your chance.  We are opening up Knowledge Guru to an Open Beta where anyone can create an account and join in on the fun – and help shape a great learning tool in the process!

All features will be available to our Open Beta testers: Topic Masteries, Knowledge Guru Status, Social Scoring Leader Boards, Achievements, and even the “Guru Grab Bag” mode can be unlocked by the dedicated learner! To make things even more interesting, we will give away a $25 iTunes gift certificate to the player with the top score on the Global Leader boards when testing ends on Friday, September 23rd.

Keep in mind – the engine’s TEST topic is Wellness. As you play, consider what topics your organization might find useful to create a Knowledge Guru game around, such as procedures, product knowledge, industry knowledge, etc.

For more details and to access the game go to http://www.theknowledgeguru.com and create your free account!

Good luck and have fun becoming a Knowledge Guru™! Then tell us what you think.

A homeless organization in North Carolina, Urban Ministries of Durham, recently created an online learning game to help people understand the challenges of living at the poverty line.  “Spent” is a great game that very easily engages you and helps you realize the challenges of working a minimum wage job. Check it out:

http://playspent.org/

While this game is meant as a marketing and awareness tool, you learn a lot about poverty as you play. It’s a very effective awareness tool, and I appreciate it for what it is. But as I played, I saw some game design principles that would be good for those of us who design workplace e-learning and learning games to remember:

• Make sure learners know where they are and what the goal is. The goal of the game is to get through a month with some money left in your pocket.  Along the right side of the screen, it tracks which day of the month I’m on and I always know how much money I have.  When people complete our e-learning, they need some mile-markers to orient themselves to where they are in the learning.
• Focus on the content, not the flashiness of the screen. The look of the game is very simple and uses mainly clean graphical icons. There is very little audio in the game, except when there naturally would be – for example, when you get a phone call. Too often with e-learning courses or serious games, we get wrapped up in how it “looks”. While that’s important, content is king! Spend your time focused on developing realistic, rich content and the amount of time/money needed for the graphics may be less.
• Create clear consequences for your decisions. Just like in real-life, there are positive and negative consequences to each decision we make. In the game, you can easily see how many days of work you’ve missed and know that if you miss more than three, you’ll lose your job. In any game you design, be sure that there are real consequences to each decision.
• Answers that aren’t black and white. Many times as I played the game, I didn’t know what the right answer was. The choice was often difficult, especially when it was about providing for your children. But this mirrors the reality of poverty. There doesn’t have to be a “right” answer in the game.

What do you think of the game? Can you see how the design principles could translate to one of your projects?

Here in Indianapolis, BLP supports Dayspring Center, which helps women and children transition out of homelessness. If you live in central Indiana, I encourage you to check them out and consider helping!

Finally – I have time to write a blog post about some of the wonderful stuff I’m immersed in at DevLearn 2010. Probably my favorite sessions today revolved around games in learning. Jerry Bush, the “game guy” for Cisco shared what Cisco is doing with learning games – and it’s really impressive. Check out some of their games here – the binary game has gone completely viral (1M players thus far) and if someone can make learning how to write binary code fun, then I am impressed!

Jerry did a great job correlating games to learning, pointing out that games mesh perfectly with the ARCS model for good learning:

• A (Attention) – games are fun, loud, engaging. They capture learners’ attention.

• R (Relevance) – a well-designed game will appeal to learners’ current interests and they will get the connection.

• C (Confidence) – games help build confidence with levels and rewards earned helping to bolster learners’ confidence.

• S (satisfaction) – learners find the rewards and the fun satisfying, making the learning experience satisfying to them. (And something they want to repeat again and again.)

Jerry pointed out that games can = learning because:

• Simulation – allows experiential opportunities. In some games, learners can get fully immersed in teh environment.

• Motivation – As stated in earlier reference to ARCS model, games are fun! Everyone feels like a winner. The competitive nature of the experience motivates players to keep playing and learning more.

• Collaboration – Games can build in collaboration and cooperation as people work together to achieve high.

• Assessment – The scoring nature of games makes it easy to assess progress and learning.

• Likability factor: Surveys at Cisco show that 85% of employees like games – and want more of them. How many of us can say THAT about the e-courses we develop?

The games Jerry showcased (MindShare game, which can be purchased on Amazon.com) as well as Binary Game both clearly built competence in learners. Per Jerry, he’s building (or rather, hiring game developer to have them built) in Flash/XML. Most of the games he showed can be built for around $50K or less, excluding his time and the subject matter expert’s time. (In other words, $50K represents the vendor’s fees for building the game.)

My prediction is that we’re going to see more organizations getting comfortable with the idea of using games – and we’ll see employees who are highly receptive to them, much more so than to the typical e-course.Games take more creativity than a e-course with a Next button, but the payoffs in terms of actual learning and tranfer to the job can be very high.

Look for a game engine beta from BLP in Q1 of 2011. If you want to be a tester, let us know!

This is a must-try for anyone who wants to explore alternate-reality games (probably one of the more highly complex forms of game play to create!). This game starts TODAY, October 7th, and it’s an experiment funded by the Robert Wood Foundation. The goal of the game is to see if the community can pool together ideas to begin to identify cures for neurological diseases – a group of diseases that cost our country billions – and devastate the lives of millions.

The game starts with a scenario in 2020 – a video clip

that shows a message from the president of the United States – announcing that he, along with millions of other Americans, have an incurable disease. Once you watch the introductory scenario, you can register to play the game. You’ll receive an email with your first set of instructions.

Let me know if you play – and what you think about how this type of approach could work inside organizations trying to teach employees analytic/problem-solving skills as well as skills in collaborating virtually.

I’ve written a few different posts on games.  I love games – and i think games help engage people and make learning more fun.

I found a few interesting games today, by chance. I was looking at Mashable, a blog on new medai and social networking, and came across their weekly list of job postings. (Worth skimming just to see the plethora of new jobs available that didn’t exist 10 years ago!). I scrolled through the posts and found several game sites who want developers. I then, naturally, checked these out (and had fun playing some games), and I found one game that I thought could be a great frame for a learning game. (Click the image to go to the game):

It mirrors the old-fashioned puzzle books where you view two pictures and find the things that are different between them. The online version is timed (45 seconds) and you have to find the five items in 45 seconds. If you are running out of time, you can click the jokers you have on the bottom. Each joker removes one of the items you have to find. This helps one what set of images. However, as you get new sets of pictures to compare, you don’t get any additional jokers. When you’ve used your five, the game is over.

The game tests your ability to compare  and contrast two images. How often have you designed instruction where at least one (if not more than one) of the learning objectives was for learners to compare/contrast two things?  I think this game could easily be adapted to suit learning purposes – and be very fun for learners to play. Games such as this can also be “rewards” for completing  a segment of an e-learning program. Example: we just completed a set of e-courses on pressure ulcers for the Department of Health. Adding a game element where nursing assistants compared/contrasted two pressure ulcers – or two patient rooms to spot the possible intervention tools available – could have been fun/engaging/rewarding/useful after they completed a learning module.

I also loved the puzzle game, “Blackbeard’s Island Lite,” but I can’t figure out how to make it applicable to a product launch or software training yet – two e-learning projects we are tackling now. Darn it! I suppose I could show learners a screen and give them 45 seconds to compare two screens and click all the things in Screen 2 that don’t mirror Screen 1. This may be useful if a screen is complex and you want to help learners recall where information is located on a screen. It’s amazing the tension I felt by being timed – and the increasing sense of competitiveness I felt as the clock ticked toward zero.  I liked this…and I think it is somewhat contextual to our jobs. We never have all the time in the world to complete tasks. Most of us feel a sense of urgency or we flat-out have only so much time to get things done.

Another note: Interesting to see the business model these gaming sites are using. You have to watch a commercial (often featuring cool animation or the opportunity for user interacton) before you get to play the free game. This last bit has nothing to do with learning, but it is interesting! If we think about what the advertiser is doing…providing content and incenting the consumer to remember the content by creating an interactive element…then we CAN see some cross-over to the learning design side of things.

I”m interested in what you think of the games I linked you to. Tell me if you liked them – and how you’d use the concept in learning.

Happy Tuesday! I was sitting on my couch enjoying my copy of Entertainment Weekly this weekend and the second page had a full page spread for “Comcast Town”. This is apparently where technology lives and is a “bigger, brigher, better world of possibility”. My first thought was that this couldn’t be true.

But today I went out to the website: comcasttown.com – and sure enough,  I can create a whole virtual life there! I can build an apartment, interact with other folks, etc. And it can connect to my Facebook account so that I can invite my friends to join me in Comcast town, brought to us by the cable company.

I don’t care if Comcast wants to create a virtual environment, but I do think that some of these marketing tools can impact the perceptions of serious games. I also find it amazing that someone would have the time or desire to create a world in a marketing environment. (Obviously, I’m not the target demographic!)

What do you think? Do people want to create these worlds? Does it impact their willingness to participate in serious learning games?

I’m not sure I have the answers. I think I’ll just finish the article on the Spring TV Preview.

I love games. I love to play games; I love to come up with games for others to play…and I have created several. What I have not yet done is to design more than a rudimentary online game…but I’m really eager to do so. One of the most fun things at last November’s DevLearn 2008 conference (sponsored by E-Learning Guild) was its focus on games. It inspired me and made me oh-so-anxious for the client who will come to me and say, “I want a learning game!”

I also took back a message from “The Serious Game Zone” (hosted by Dr. Alicia Sanchez who is a research scientist with a LOT of knowledge about games). Motivation is everything in a game…if the learner isn’t engaged, they will not play. Period. So…a game can have great instructional intent but if it is not fun, learners will not play. In a serious game, the “game” part of it is as critical as the “serious (aka learning)” part of it.

I spent time today playing one of the games I saw at Devlearn – and I am really impressed by its instructional design and its “fun” design.  “Moneytopia” is a  game that is designed to teach teens and twenty-somethings (though just about everyone in America could benefit, I believe) about handling and investing money…and living within their means. I kept wanting to play…and increase my financial portfolio.  To do that, I HAD to complete the short learning pieces (housed within my financial statment) centered on financial management because that was a key way that I grew my money. And…I couldn’t shortcut out of them because if I did then I missed the money-making opportunities embedded within them. And…on the instructional side…all of the learning activities they had me do were absolutely relevant to the content.  I didn’t feel like they were dumbing anything down – and each learning presentation was really short (two or three minutes).

Check out this game for yourselves. Allow yourself at least 15-20 minutes to play it to really get the flavor of the game and the instructional design that went into it. Let me know how you’d rate it on a “fun” scale and on an “learning” scale. I can immediately think of all sorts of ways to mimic the design for other applications – and I feel confident that the design of it is not too sophisticated for a lot of good instructional designers to imitate.  It appears to be a Flash-based game design, which means it is within the grasp of many of us.

Click the image to check out the game for yourself. Again, let me know what you think!

http://moneytopia.knowledgedirectweb.com/game/moneytopia.html