Learning by Playing: Turning Business Training Into a Game
They say you can learn from children, and it is true. A few days ago, I was half-fainting on the sofa when the last spark of my consciousness noticed my older daughter playing with her little sister.
This may be obvious to most people, but it was not obvious to me. In that very split second, I realised something important:
✨ my daughters were learning by playing.
Until then, I had always felt that they were just wasting time before fully entering society. Big mistake. My bad. There was something very warm and simple in that moment: a parent realising that play is not wasted time, but learning in action.
🧠 Learning does not always look like learning
When I see something great, I usually ask myself how I could benefit from it. Individual coaching and small group sessions are terrific environments for learning something new. On the other hand, reading and listening often put me in a strange state between sleep and wakefulness, where dreams and reality start merging together. Not ideal for learning. So what is left in between?
📄 PDF, slides, infographics… or something more?
Suppose you need to deliver a message to a large audience using digital media. How would you do it?
📄 A PDF?
📊 A slide deck?
🖼️ Maybe an infographic?
All of those can work, but they do not always create a trigger: that little urge to learn that keeps itching at us during the day, making it almost impossible to resist going back and engaging with the content. Could that trigger be a game?
🕹️ What if business learning felt like play?
Imagine an internal portal with a game running on it. On that same portal, there is a public high-score board visible to everyone. The only way to earn points is to play the game and, while playing, learn.
🏆 Would that create healthy competition among peers?
😊 Would it make the learning process more fun?
🔁 Could it make people come back again and again?
Why are we not playing more “business” games anyway?
A business learning game could replace passive training material with something people actually want to return to. Not because they have been told to read it, but because they want to beat the score, complete the challenge, and improve.
🧩 A small prototype, not a finished product
The link below takes you to a business game. It is not meant to be a finished product. Think of it more as an interactive prototype for interaction design.
I put it together using custom building blocks that can be acquired online. Today, there are many resources available, and initiatives like this can be much faster and cheaper to implement than they used to be.
💬 What do you think?
I would be very interested to know what you think about it, how it could be improved, and what your thoughts are on learning through play in general.
Do you already have any success stories, or even failure stories, from similar initiatives?
🃏 How to play
This is a memory card game, one of those games where a grown-up has little or no chance against a child. Do you not believe it? Try it for yourself.
👉 Where to play: 8 Properties of Data Visualization Tools
Originally published on LinkedIn on the 29th of May 2016