Gamification : Using games to create immersive learning experiences

In the last few years, recall the top things that made the news?

Demonetization, Brexit, Unemployment, Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, PubG,…

Though games aren’t the new fad but most recently, gaming is taking over the world.  They went from being the preserve of nerds and geeks to being more prominent than films. And now they are making their mark in education and learning segment.

Yes, playing games can now make 21st-century skills!

Researches have shown that our brains are wired for pleasure. The games are an effective way to learn because they simulate thrill and keep our minds engaged and happy. But what exactly do we learn from them? In an era consumed with developing 21st-century soft skills, are games any good at building critical thinking or collaboration skills?

The answer is likely, yes.

Immersive gamification can bring learners of multiple generations to collaborate, motivate each other, and learn from a real-world application. When Rewards are coupled with learning, it creates a sense of excitement to achieving objectives and creates a sense of accomplishment.

Gamification proves to be an effective approach to learning too. As reported by studies, globally, the gamification of education market will explode to $1.2 billion in 2020 from just about $93 million in 2015.

Here is why Gamification can offer your workforce the immersive learning experience they want:

Problem-solving: 

Gamification’s most significant benefit is that it minimizes the traditional, outdated style of learning by challenging the participant at precisely the right level. When learners feel challenged, they are motivated to learn more. 

Recognition Motivates:

When learners are publicly or even privately recognized, they feel more satisfied and accomplished. The gamified platforms these days allow learners to view awards in their learner dashboard and then share those awards with classmates, via social media, or by downloading transcripts and certificates. 

Re-activates curiosity:

Humans have a natural desire to be curious, discover, and to learn, but this is often discouraged with old training methods. Gamification can re-activate this desire to inculcate learning as a part of daily routine.

Gamified learning acts on multiple senses for an immersive experience that increases learners' enjoyment and desire to achieve goals. This response to purely recreational games is now being harnessed and used in the business world. 

One can further enhance the experience of the gamified learning by inculcating following techniques:

Create real life scenarios that challenge the learner. A strong story where the player is a put as a protagonist will get learners to engage and care. This creates stress and tension that propels the learner forward.

Build urgency in the program. By having a threat working against the learner you are increasing the need desire to move faster and do better. The key is having the threat be immediate and real. 

Ultimately, gamification gives us goals and goals give purpose. When used correctly, it uses our natural tendency to be goal-orientated and to set standards we want to achieve in the future.

Source: People Matters, 22 July 2019

Products Spread Differently Than Entirely New Products

Predictions about how products spread are usually based on the assumption that a few early adopters encourage an increasing number of people to start using the product. This assumption has largely been true of new technologies. But our research on phones, cars, and apps shows that when a product is not new but instead updates or replaces an existing product (which we call replacement innovations), the growth curve is very different, and managers making estimates around exponential growth are setting unrealistic expectations.

A better formula for estimating the early growth of replacement innovations follows a power law, with rapid adoption in the beginning followed by much more gradual takeoff as users make individual adoption decisions. This model generates more accurate predictions about adoption and, in turn, more realistic expectations and better understanding of resource needs.

New innovative products or technologies rarely emerge from a vacuum; in many cases they replace old technologies or earlier offerings that served a similar purpose. Consider 4K TV. The recently released technology delivers better image resolution for an enhanced TV-viewing experience. While that’s desirable, most people already have a TV — or three. So in order for them to buy a 4K TV, their calculus isn’t about just the new TV in and of itself; it’s also about whether to discard the old to bring in the new, at a somewhat hefty price tag.

To study the adoption of replacement innovations, we examined four areas: mobile phones (patterns for use of 885 handsets among 3.6 million Northern European customers between 2006 and 2014), cars (sales patterns for 126 automobiles sold in North America between 2010 and 2016), apps (daily downloads for the 2,672 most popular iOS apps from November 2016 to December 2016), and scientists’ research focus (246,630 scientists who published in 6,399 research fields). In each of these areas we documented the early growth of replacement innovations following a power law with non-integer exponents. This means that when the product was introduced, it had a singular growth momentum that was fundamentally different from its growth in the rest of sales periods.

To understand this, consider what happens when Apple releases a new iPhone. There may well be lines of early adopters outside the store for the device’s release, but subsequently, even if positive word-of-mouth spreads, the next waves of adopters will have to decide that they’re ready to replace their current phones with the new one. The slower, more deliberate decisions they make help to explain why replacement innovations grow more slowly.

We identified three mechanisms that are primarily responsible for the observed replacement dynamics: (1) recency, or how recently the new innovation has been introduced; (2) replacement propensity, as some products are more “fit” to replace original versions than others are; and (3) popularity, since more successful, or popular, products, are more likely to attract more new users — success begets success. A model that combines these three mechanisms enables us to explain the growth patterns of replacement products and to identify three parameters associated with this growth. These parameters are: fitness (how fit your product is to replace others), anticipation (initial excitement among potential users), and longevity (how long before the product may become obsolete). To understand intuitively how sales will go, ask yourself about each of these variables. The more recent or popular the innovation, or the better the product-market fit, the higher the sales.

Business leaders are often faced with the challenge of understanding which factors best determine whether and when a new product will succeed in unseating incumbent innovations. Our model offers a new way to start estimating the three adoption parameters once initial sales data becomes available. Decision makers can use these early figures and other related signals to assess whether the product’s fit, initial excitement, and shelf life are meeting expectations, and adjust tactics accordingly. For example, it may be important to focus on fit and improving product shelf life (longevity) during the design phase, with more attention to generating excitement (anticipation) among target users as the product launch nears.

For managers making decisions about when and how to release replacement products and innovations, this finding means that if you’ve been applying the traditional adoption model to what could be considered replacement products, you’re likely underestimating the initial excitement about your new product while overestimating the overall speed and size of adoption. This could mean wasted opportunities at the outset, followed by unrealistic expectations and, potentially, misallocated resources for the expected growth phase. On the other hand, our finding about the adoption of replacement innovations can help to create better prediction models, which may lead to better long-term organizational performance and create a significant advantage that competitors using other models can’t match.

Source: HBR 17 July, 19

8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year

How much do you read?

For most of my adult life I read maybe five books a year — if I was lucky. I’d read a couple on vacation and I’d always have a few slow burners hanging around the bedside table for months.

And then last year I surprised myself by reading 50 books. This year I’m on pace for 100. I’ve never felt more creatively alive in all areas of my life. I feel more interesting, I feel like a better father, and my writing output has dramatically increased. Amplifying my reading rate has been the domino that’s tipped over a slew of others.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t do it sooner.

Why did I wait 20 years?

Well, our world today is designed for shallow skimming rather than deep diving, so it took me some time to identify the specific changes that skyrocketed my reading rate. None of them had to do with how fast I read. I’m actually a pretty slow reader.

Here’s my advice for fitting more reading into your own life, based on the behaviors that I changed:

Centralize reading in your home. Back in 1998, psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues performed their famous “chocolate chip cookie and radish” experiment. They split test subjects into three groups and asked them not to eat anything for three hours before the experiment. Group 1 was given chocolate chip cookies and radishes, and were told they could eat only the radishes. Group 2 was given chocolate chip cookies and radishes, and were told they could eat anything they liked. Group 3 was given no food at all. Afterward, the researchers had all three groups attempt to solve an impossible puzzle, to see how long they would last. It’s not surprising that group 1, those who had spent all their willpower staying away from the cookies, caved the soonest.

What does this have to do with reading? I think of having a TV in your main living area as a plate of chocolate chip cookies. So many delicious TV shows tempt us, reducing our willpower to tackle the books.

Roald Dahl’s poem “Television” says it all: “So please, oh please, we beg, we pray / go throw your TV set away / and in its place, you can install / a lovely bookshelf on the wall.”

Last year my wife and I moved our sole TV into our dark, unfinished basement and got a bookshelf installed on the wall beside our front door. Now we see it, walk by it, and touch it dozens of times a day. And the TV sits dormant unless the Toronto Blue Jays are in the playoffs or Netflix drops a new season of House of Cards.

Make a public commitment. In his seminal book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini shares a psychology study showing that once people place their bets at the racetrack, they are much more confident about their horse’s chances than they were just before laying down the bet. He goes on to explain how commitment is one of the big six weapons of social influence. So why can’t we think of ourselves as the racehorses? Make the bet on reading by opening an account at Goodreads or Reco, friending a few coworkers or friends, and then updating your profile every time you read a book. Or put together an email list to send out short reviews of the books you read. I do exactly that each month, with my Monthly Book Club Email. I stole the idea from bestselling author Ryan Holiday, who has a great reading list.

Find a few trusted, curated lists. Related to the above, the publishing industry puts out more than 50,000 books a year. Do you have time to sift through 1,000 new books a week? Nobody does, so we use proxies like Amazon reviews. But should we get our reading lists from retailers? If you’re like me, and you love the “staff picks” wall in independent bookstores, there’s nothing as nice as getting one person’s favorite books. Finding a few trusted, curated lists can be as simple as the email lists I mentioned, but with a bit of digging you can likely find the one that totally aligns with your tastes. Some of the lists that I personally like are: Bill Gates’s reading list; Derek Sivers’s reading list; and Tim Ferriss’s list, where he has collected the recommendations of many of his podcast guests.

Change your mindset about quitting. It’s one thing to quit reading a book and feel bad about it. It’s another to quit a book and feel proud of it. All you have to do is change your mindset. Just say, “Phew! Now I’ve finally ditched this brick to make room for that gem I’m about to read next.” An article that can help enable this mindset is “The Tail End,” by Tim Urban, which paints a striking picture of how many books you have left to read in your lifetime. Once you fully digest that number, you’ll want to hack the vines away to reveal the oases ahead.

I quit three or four books for every book I read to the end. I do the “first five pages test” before I buy any book (checking for tone, pace, and language) and then let myself off the hook if I need to stop halfway through.

Take a “news fast” and channel your reading dollars. I subscribed to the New York Times and five magazines for years. I rotated subscriptions to keep them fresh, and always loved getting a crisp new issue in the mail. After returning from a long vacation where I finally had some time to lose myself in books, I started realizing that this shorter, choppier nature of reading was preventing me from going deeper. So I canceled all my subscriptions.

Besides freeing up mindshare, what does canceling all news inputs do? For me, it saved more than $500 per year. That can pay for about 50 books per year. What would I rather have 10 or 20 years later — a prized book collection which I’ve read and learned from over the years…or a pile of old newspapers? And let’s not forget your local library. If you download Library Extension for your browser, you can see what books and e-books are available for free right around the corner.

Triple your churn rate. I realized that for years I’d thought of my bookshelf as a fixed and somewhat artistic object: There it is, sitting by the flower vases! Now I think of it as a dynamic organism. Always moving. Always changing. In a given week I probably add about five books to the shelf and get rid of three or four. Books come in through lending libraries in our neighborhood, a fantastic used bookstore, local indie and chain stores, and, of course, online outlets. Books go out when we pass them to friends, sell them to the used bookstore, or drop them off at the lending library. This dynamism means I’m always walking over to the shelf, never just walking by it. As a result, I read more.

Read physical books. You may be wondering why I don’t just read e-books on a mobile device, saving myself all the time and effort required to bring books in and out of the house. In an era when our movie, film, and photography collections are all going digital, there is something grounding about having an organically growing collection of books in the home. If you want to get deep, perhaps it’s a nice physical representation of the evolution and changes in your mind while you’re reading. (Maybe this is why my wife refuses to allow my Far Side collections on her shelf.) And since many of us look at screens all day, it can be a welcome change of pace to hold an actual book in your hands.

Reapply the 10,000 steps rule. A good friend once told me a story that really stuck with me. He said Stephen King had advised people to read something like five hours a day. My friend said, “You know, that’s baloney. Who can do that?” But then, years later, he found himself in Maine on vacation. He was waiting in line outside a movie theater with his girlfriend, and who should be waiting in front of him? Stephen King! His nose was in a book the whole time in line. When they got into the theater, Stephen King was still reading as the lights dimmed. When the lights came up, he pulled his book open right away. He even read as he was leaving. Now, I have not confirmed this story with Stephen King. But I think the message this story imparts is an important one. Basically, you can read a lot more. There are minutes hidden in all the corners of the day, and they add up to a lot of minutes.

In a way, it’s like the 10,000 steps rule. Walk around the grocery store, park at the back of the lot, chase your kids around the house, and bam — 10,000 steps. It’s the same with reading.

When did I read those five books a year for most of my life? On holidays or during long flights. “Oh! A lot of downtime coming,” I’d think. “Better grab a few books.”

When do I read now? All the time. A few pages here. A few pages there. I have a book in my bag at all times. In general I read nonfiction in the mornings, when my mind is in active learning mode, and fiction at night before bed, when my mind needs an escape. Slipping pages into all the corners of the day adds up.

Source: HBR  03 Feb, 2017