Gamification - Game Design
IBM - Gamification Consultant and Game Producer
Under their Learning & Knowledge banner, IBM initiated a company wide push in 2017 to up-skill and train their global practitioner workforce of around one-hundred-thousand employees. The training, known internally as the Consulting Academy, was a week long course where participants learned hard and soft skills through various exercises. The content covered a range of topics from sales and negotiation, to teamwork and communication. As Gamification Consultant on the project my role was to inject game mechanics into the coursework to increase participant engagement and retention of the material.
GLOBAL TEAM PROJECT
The Consulting Academy was designed remotely by a core team of about 20 people stationed throughout the globe. Initially launching in North America, the project quickly upscaled to international deployments in the Middle East and Africa within the first 8 months, and then Australia and Asia within the first year. Deploying 3-4 courses a month, each in its own location, required our team to stay updated on the status of all schools at once. This was made possible by our team’s dedicated use of Agile Methodologies, along with managing tools like Jira and Trello.
Gamification of Coursework
The training was gamified in three different ways, case study simulations, leadership behavior reinforcement, and a content retention analysis.
The case study simulation set the participants in a client facing situation where they needed to accomplish a specific task. For instance, we had the participants conduct a design workshop with their client. They were scored in a number of categories on their performance during the activity and provided feedback on how to improve. Then the exercise would be run again but with additional challenges, like pitching to a disinterested client.
Within the course material was a framework of leadership behaviors- Sense & Act, Disrupt, Co-create, and Boost & Amplify. Whenever a participant or team exemplified one of these core behaviors they were awarded a physical token that equated to one point toward their overall team score.
Participants were also tested on their ability to retain the content from the course. We did this by starting every day, after the first, with a trivia game to review the content of the previous day. Instead of having the students take a quiz in the morning we start them off with a competitive trivia game. The challenge here was to find an energizing way to start a very long day of in-class training.
At the end of the week, the team with the most points from each classroom was declared the winner and awarded small prizes along with their team picture hung in the school Hall of Fame.
Philadelphia Community Program
Our North America Consulting Academy was delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was part of the mission statement of the course to have a significant impact and presence in each city that we delivered the school. With that in mind we partnered with the City of Philadelphia to create a STEM mentoring and skills training program for middle-school and high-school kids. In addition to my role as Gamification Consultant, I was tasked with organizing the activities of the inaugural event. We hosted an IBM Design Thinking workshop where the students walked through the process of designing an AI chat-bot using Watson Conversation APIs.