This is the fourth in a series of short blogs from the CIPD Midlands Area Partnership event.
After a good lunch we move back to breakout sessions and I’ve opted for a session about “Making learning as addictive as video games”
We started straight in to future trends which can be summarised….
- Virtual reality is here
- Game based learning
- Augmented reality
- Machine learning (building algorithms for personalised learning)
- Social learning
…….and then talked in pairs about what games we play and the roles they have in our lives. I use several games, often as a way to gain some headspace or practice at mindfulness. Across the room there was a wide variety of answers from sports games through to Pokemon Go and it was clear that many in the room are being taught about digital games by their children so I wondered whether older employees might not engage without younger colleagues to encourage them.
We moved on to a group exercise about designing the structure of a game. This was a useful exercise, not least because one of our group had a really interesting challenge they wanted training for – dispensing controlled medication in a hostel environment with multiple demands on attention / time. (Other groups had ideas around difficult conversations and safe driving). I enjoyed the emphasis on who the players would be, what characters we might need in the game and then the scenes / settings we might use. Working more visually is not always easy for me and yet it was fun to work in the team with our idea.
Overall I felt that this session didn’t really deliver on its title. It was clear that many attributes of playing games would be really useful in designing learning so for example a sense of play, learning by doing, potential to fail in a safe environment and of course the sense of achievement / gaining reward for completing tasks. So whilst it was interesting to think through problems and consider how you might deliver a game to train staff I didn’t get any sense of why you would choose games over other forms of delivery.