Posts with tag gamification

Leadership development is one of those corporate buzzwords that gets thrown around enough to make my eyes glaze over and my mind wander. Large businesses have complex organizational hierarchies and are always looking for ways to make themselves and their employees perform more efficiently. I have heard many a raid leader detail just how their experience organizing boss takedowns has translated into positive management skills in their workplace. Considering this, it's really not a big surprise that businesses are finally starting to look toward the system of rewards and achievements that many games employ in order to promote engagement and interactivity in leadership training programs.

A recent Forbes article outlines the way a specific organization, NTT Data, is using gaming strategies to implement management training courses. Their "global head of gamification," Naureen Meraj, had the idea to make a game that put the trainees into a series of simulated leadership scenarios, and track their progress. Similarly, Deloitte's Leadership Academy tracks its participants' progress using a mission or quest format, awarding badges (achievements), and maintains leaderboards so that "players" can compare their own achievements to others.

According to their own metrics, the programs have been wildly successful so far, which seems to signify a promising outlook for the gamification of certain business strategies. What do you think? Would you be more interested in professional training if it adopted certain features of your favorite games, such as WoW? Or do you want to keep your work and hobbies firmly separated?

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Everything they learned, they learned from World of Warcraft -- or in this case, everything they taught. Congratulations are in order for WoW players and educators Lucas Gillispie and Peggy Sheehy, whose WoWinSchool program has earned a GAward for Best Use of Engagement Techniques in Education at the Gamification Summit 2013 taking place now in San Francisco. The award recognizes the effective use engagement techniques such as loyalty, gamification, and behavioral science in programs, apps, projects, campaigns, and companies.

"WoW in School: The Hero's Journey" is a full-year language arts course for middle school students. While the program was initially targeted for "at-risk" youths, Gillispie and Sheehy quickly saw that the approach was a hit with learners of all abilities and backgrounds.

Don't we wish our own teachers had been so open-minded and current? See how Gillispie and Sheehy win the hearts and minds of their young students in our in-depth interviews with the dynamic educators, Learn to game to game to learn and WoW goes to English class.

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It's only been a couple of weeks since we reported on the crowdsourcing effort to fund the autism research of well-known Restokin blogger and Blizzard MVP poster Lissanna, aka Dr. Elisabeth Whyte of the Laboratory of Developmental Neuroscience at Penn State. So far, supporters have boosted Dr. Whyte to just over a quarter of her funding goal for the project, which focuses on how children and adolescents with autism understand language and process information from faces (such as recognizing people or understanding emotional expressions). Her goal: designing a video game to help kids with autism improve these skills.

How does an MMO-playing grad student transform from anonymous gamer to well-known WoW blogger, Blizzard forum MVP, and Ph.D.-level researcher bringing gamification to the treatment of autism? If you follow the example of this lady: with ease.

WoW Insider: One-fourth of your funding already under your belt -- congratulations! Our readers already know that WoW can be beneficial to kids with autism, so it's exciting to hear about a gamification project designed to help kids with autism.

Lissanna: Many kids and adults with autism seem to enjoy playing video games. We have some evidence that using fun activities can motivate learning. Our goal is to develop and test the efficacy of an educational game that impacts face processing abilities and social skills. With much of the research focused on important early intervention work, there is a huge gap in the services that individuals with autism can receive when they are older. We think that a sophisticated game can fill the need for social skills services targeting older individuals to help with tasks like preparing them for jobs or developing friendships with their peers.