UQAM becomes a player in the market for gamified IT training

Imagine that an environmental disaster has caused primitive bacteria to take over everyone’s brain. To save the human race, each person’s brain must be rewired.

Don’t panic – it’s just a video game. Welcome to Neuro-Ludus, a game designed by Montreal researchers to test the effectiveness of gamification in IT training. Its dramatic opening scene is meant to draw players into the game, where they solve various puzzles to win points and advance through 30 levels.

Clearly, this is not traditional tech skills training. And that’s exactly the point.

“This game is very engaging. We wanted it to be accessible for a wide range of people,” says Dr. France Boutin, a professor at the Université du Québec a Montréal (UQAM).

Boutin developed the Neuro-Ludus game with a team that includes Dr. Chris Chinien, president of Compétences/Skills R&D Inc. They cite research suggesting video gamers fare better than non-gamers at multitasking, short-term memory, spatial cognition and information processing – all essential to learning new IT skills. The same research also shows video games help people ‘learn how to learn.’ It’s a transferable cognitive skill that many schools and IT courses ignore, says Chinien.

“They don’t teach people to learn how to learn. They teach subjects,” he says.

The Neuro-Ludus project is underpinned by new research on neuroplasticity as well.

“People thought our brain was fixed or hard-wired, that you’re born and you die with the same kind of cognitive skills and they can’t be changed. Now with recent neuroscience research, we discovered the brain is soft-wired. With training and experience you can alter the way the brain is wired,” says Chinien.

Can video games effectively teach IT skills? Can gamified training rewire the brains of non-techies to help them acquire IT skills faster? Boutin and Chinien’s team built the Neuro-Ludus game to find out.

They’ve put out a worldwide call for volunteers aged 18 and older to test Neuro-Ludus. (Ludus is Latin for ‘game’ or ‘learning’.) The game will be available for test play in French and English for computers, tablets and smartphones from May until December.

Gamified IT training has already been put into play at Launchfire Interactive Inc. The Ottawa firm gamifies consumer promotions and corporate training for clients such as Telus, Costco and Sobeys.

“Probably the coolest (IT training game) we did was for Dell, Intel and Microsoft. All three of them were collaborating to train Dell staff on the value proposition of Dell computers in combination with Intel chips and Microsoft server-side software,” says John Findlay, Launchfire’s chief technology officer.

Each Dell employee was given a virtual budget to build their own data centre by choosing server, chip and software components. If their data centre stayed on budget and successfully completed various tasks (like handling email traffic or shooting down viruses), players earned ‘money’ to upgrade their data centre and move to the next round. (They had a chance to win real prizes as well.)

“The people it was targeted at were both IT folks and salespeople because Dell wanted them to understand some of the complexities and value propositions of these products,” says Findlay. “And the average person played for almost an hour. So in terms of engagement it was one of the more successful (training programs) that Dell had done.”

“The whole process of learning by game is just considerably more fun,” Findlay adds. “And I think it speaks to a realization that people are gradually coming to, that there are better ways to teach people.”