Ready4Tomorrow: A gamified 5G learning project from Nokia Athens
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Nokia's vision for 2020 is one of a connected world, where 5G Networks, make our lives better and easier. To get there, the company needed to instruct her employees on 5G technologies first. In Nokia Athens, a gamification project was launched, engaging 300 engineers in a game were learning and creation of learning was the main focus. These people are now Ready4Tomorrow.
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Ready4Tomorrow: A gamified 5G learning project from Nokia Athens
- 1. Ready4Tomorrow A Gamified 5G Learning Project from Nokia Athens Alex Chalkias
- 2. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word NOKIA? We don’t just do cellphones anymore!
- 3. We create the technology to connect the world
- 4. 1990 2000 2010 2020 Nokia’s Technology Vision Enabling the human possibilities of technology secure
- 5. Ready4Tomorrow Gamification project in a big corporate environment Athens Competence Development Stream Policies & Constraints Mission & Deliverables 3 Phases 4 week- iterations Free format 5G Ready 30 Experts 300 Literates Support Functions SOLEIL
- 8. The characters Research Mentors SmartNets - Latency - Capacity - Adapters - Energy Oracles - Experts Rogues - Learners High Council - Evaluators InGame
- 9. The characters Research Mentors SmartNets - Latency - Capacity - Adapters - Energy Oracles - Experts Rogues - Learners Watchmen – Business Admins High Council - Evaluators Machinists - Game Admins InGame Non Game
- 10. R4T – The Game Evolving while playing: The game platform Energy Capacity SmartNets Adapters Latency
- 11. <Change information classification in footer> R4T – The Game Evolving while playing: Boost Actions Rogues per Faction
- 12. <Change information classification in footer> Boost Activities Oracles & Rogues Feedback mechanisms at the core of R4T Gamification team to overtake more projects Machinists gain experience in gamification techniques Engage Improve Learn Gamify Plan for the Future R4T – The Game Evolving while playing: Experience
- 13. Nokia Location scale 300 engineers engaged Gamification of Learning Gamification of Learning Object creation Our greatest successes Good 5G material Reduced learning curve Learning Innovation Official effort allocation
- 14. Our magnificent failures Enthusiasts VS Managers Side projects = Projects Too complex Too many changes No communications plan What’s in it for my players
- 15. The avalanche effect Greek Gamification Network Employees inspired to spend time on personal development New approaches for Learning and Employee Engagement 8 gamification projects currently running in Nokia Athens Gamification Certifications R4T with Victus Customer R4T in Athens Gamification meetup R4T Gamification MBA Thesis
Editor's Notes
- Hello, I am Alex Chalkias and I work as a software engineer for Nokia.
- I want to ask you: What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “Nokia”? Is it something like this? Well I must inform you, we don’t just do cellphones anymore.
- After 150 years of successful reinvention, from paper and rubber, to semiconductors and mobile phones, today we operate at the convergence of technologies, disciples and markets. Our broad portfolio includes telecommunications and networks, Cloud, IoT and Cognitive technologies. We like to say that we create the technology to connect the world.
- Nokia’s vision is “Enabling the human possibilities of technology”, which is also our new motto. We want to be the leaders that drive the 5th generation of telecommunications into 2020. In order for 5G to become a reality we need to overcome the 5-sided challenge of providing smart networks with maximum speeds, profitably, securely and with minimum energy consumption. So how can a multibillion corporation prepare itself for the challenges ahead?
- Well I can at least tell you what happened in Athens, one of the biggest sites of Nokia worldwide, with a headcount of more than thousant employees and also my place of work. In Nokia, we have Competence Development Streams, that manage knowledge databases and learning management systems and organize trainings based on business needs. Driven by the 5G Ready business need, Pantelis, our Athens competence development manager and one of the most creative and passionate people I know, had a vision to create a new way of learning. With that in mind, he defined a framework called SOLEIL based on the Self-Organizing Learning Environment approach. He also set specific policies and support functions to ensure his vision was to going to be channeled through a formal process within the organization. In November of 2015, a call for interest was send, regarding a project that would consist of three phases and would provide deliverables in a free format in 4-week iterations. The project’s mission, was to generate 30 5G experts and 300 5G Literates.
- The call for interest was asking for designers, gamers and game designers to participate in the creation of a learning game for 5G technologies. Game design was close to my heart since I had created an Android Augmented Reality escape game for my Master’s thesis. I also wanted to know more on 5G technologies. So, I volunteered to join the project team. During the first meetings, we had some great brainstorming on how we should bring people into the game, how we could differentiate between 5G experts and learners and what roles to assign to them. It was also during these meetings that I heard the term gamification for the first time. Between game enthusiasts, we quickly came into agreement. Our 5G learning project would use game mechanics to maximize engagement and participation. We would be monitoring user behaviors and extensively use feedback mechanisms. We named our project Ready4Tomorrow, since we were preparing ourselves to undertake future work as engineers. The first phase of the game was going to run for three months, during the summer of 2015.
- Our game's story is set in a dystopian future, where man’s greed for technological prowess lost him something he should cherish more, human connection. Where all seemed to be lost, the Oracles send a few skilled engineers back to the present to rogue technology, with the sole purpose of discovering the true 5G communication and save the future. Basically, I have just introduced you to the 2 most important characters of our game.
- Oracles were our 5G experts to be. They got a few days off from daily work every month to focus on research and created deliverables – learning objects to be studied by the Rogues. The experts formed teams that we called Factions, based on 5 areas of 5G Research. We provided Research mentors to each Faction, to help them during their quest. We also introduced the High Council – a team of engineers with relevant Academic background, that would evaluate the deliverables and award the best Factions with coins. Rogues we allowed to follow the Factions of their liking, and their goal was to study as many deliverables as possible to gain XP. The Faction with the highest amount of Coins and the Rogue with the highest sum of XP at the end of the game, were to be declared the winners. My team was called the Machinists. We acted as Dungeon Masters ensuring the game flow stayed on course. Finally, the SOLEIL Administrators or Watchmen, were a two-man team, overseeing the entire project, making sure it met its business objective.
- Oracles were our 5G experts to be. They got a few days off from daily work every month to focus on research and created deliverables – learning objects to be studied by the Rogues. The experts formed teams that we called Factions, based on 5 areas of 5G Research. We provided Research mentors to each Faction, to help them during their quest. We also introduced the High Council – a team of engineers with relevant Academic background, that would evaluate the deliverables and award the best Factions with coins. Rogues we allowed to follow the Factions of their liking, and their goal was to study as many deliverables as possible to gain XP. The Faction with the highest amount of Coins and the Rogue with the highest sum of XP at the end of the game, were to be declared the winners. My team was called the Machinists. We acted as Dungeon Masters ensuring the game flow stayed on course. Finally, the SOLEIL Administrators or Watchmen, were a two-man team, overseeing the entire project, making sure it met its business objective.
- While our project planning phase took a few months, we were eager to kick-off the game. The plan was to have the Oracles create the first deliverables and then launch the Rogues into the game. Since we were not full-time game designers, we gave ourselves the benefit of the doubt and decided we should implement fast, gather feedback and do corrective actions. So, we started from a pen and paper type of game, using web pages with text, images and tables, and a few iterations later, switched to a nicely designed WordPress game platform. After each monthly iteration, the administrators had retrospective meetings with the Oracles to discuss suggestions for improvement.
- One of them, was to organize Boost Actions, like printing and handing out pins with the Factions avatars. Pins were very popular between our players and some of them still wear them today! Another boost action was a 5G demo with robots to explain the concept of network latency. A third one was a Live 5G escape game to educate engineers about smart-nets. The boost actions were a great success, which is proven by the large increase in Rogue participation on every occurrence.
- Overall, evolving while playing is what we consider to be the most important element of this project. In the beginning, we were far from being experienced in gamification, or project management. But after 9 months of being involved with Ready4Tomorrow that was no longer the case. Oracles and Rogues were effectively learning 5G. We were successfully engaging more and more people in our project. We were significantly improving the game using the feedback mechanisms. We gained hands-on experience on gamification techniques and we were starting to plan for future endeavors.
- In retrospect, we can say we had some great success with R4T. Most of our deliverables were rated good and some even excellent 5G learning material. Some Oracles really went the extra mile, making the most out of the liberty they were granted. They even delivered a flash web game once! We measured peoples’ onboarding, that showed a reduced learning curve and a reduced time to productivity for 5G work. We innovated the learning process, replacing the monolithic Learning Management System used before with a fun game. We managed to get official manager approval for effort allocation of the Oracles, which is a big deal for a side-project. One might debate the allocated time was too little, but even so, this was a first! R4T is the biggest gamification project within all Nokia to date, engaging nearly 300 engineers in a side project. And lastly, I am sure you have heard of many projects on gamification of learning, but have you heard of many projects that also combine it with the gamification of learning object creation? Well, I don’t want to brag about it, so I always remind myself of our magnificent failures to stay grounded.
- Although evolving while playing is truly a good thing, it didn’t come without any drawbacks. Many players complained that the rules of the game could become complex and unclear and that too many changes were happening during the game run. It is true, we overdid it with the amount of game characters. We also changed our game platform overnight, and this created confusion for our players. But, as they say, if you don’t make mistakes you won’t improve. I also felt we shot ourselves in the foot a little bit, due to the fact we didn’t specify a communications plan. We mostly used mass mails and a few teaser posters to promote the game. As a result, we constantly got questions from Nokia engineers asking whether participation was mandatory … We even got feedback from some that they ‘ve never heard that a game was running in Nokia Athens. Also, the monthly iterations implicitly created pauses for the Rogues and therefore they easily lost track of what was in it for them. I know now that constantly reminding your users of what their desired in-game behavior should be, is a good recipe to avoid disaster. In my opinion, all our failures have a single root cause. This project was not about daily work. Therefore, many things were planned on the go and some decisions were made on the fly. We acted more as game enthusiasts rather than project managers. Our lessons learned are to treat side-projects as normal projects, plan to detail and try to be as proactive as possible.
- Fast forward to the present day, two years after the call for interest for R4T, it is safe to say that this game created an avalanche effect. We see employees that participated in the game, spending more time on their personal development, while new ways for Learning and Employee engagement constantly arise within Nokia. Our Machinists team saw 8 gamification projects brought to life, not including the second phase of R4T that is wrapping up as we speak. Also 2 of us, including yours truly, got certified in Octalysis Gamification and a third one wrote a thesis on Gamification for her MBA, pending a publication with some of us as co-authors. Very recently, the same manager that started it all, approached our customer teams with the same concept and now we have another R4T game run between Nokia and Victus, a subsidiary of Vodafone which is one of our biggest customers. Finally, last year, we were proud to present our work to the Athens gamification meetup and gave R4T some visibility outside the company. Our increasing love of gamification inspired us to launch the Greek Gamification Network, the first online community for gamification enthusiasts in Greece.