Dopamine, a World of Wonder
When my kids were really young, Pokemon became very popular. One day, my preschool daughter told me about all 50 Pokemons, each of their name, strengths, weakness, the food it likes, and so on. I was stunned. Just a day before, a friend told me her second-grad son had trouble to memorize multiplication table. I thought what if we turn all the school work into games? No kids would have trouble to memorize any thing then. Imagine a marriage when all the household chores are games?!
So when Coursera first offered Gamification class years ago, I jumped in with all the excitement. This is my condensed one-page summary after finished the course.
Years late when I was working on warehouse software, I have to visit different warehouses as part of my training. 10 hours a day on their foot, the workers working on stowing, piking or packing are in a building that can host 10 soccer fields but have no window, and the only sound they can hear were loud noises from running conveyor belts, moving folk lifts, and roaming robots (it’s not allowed to wear any earphones to listen to music there). One worker told me his working days were physically tiring and emotionally exhausting. Most workers I met were not happy, and some called it “a brain dead job”. But in one hot June day when I was visiting a warehouse in Phoenix, things were different. First of all, when the workers walked in in the morning, they were all in colorful workout outfits and each were holding a water bottle, just like gym-goers entering a health club. At the start, the manager Scott gathered everyone in a circle, and instructing them with warmup stretches. Everyone followed Scott with enthusiastic laughters. At the end, Scott asked each to reset their pedometers. Because at the end of the shift, Scott would hand out small rewards, such as a hat or a T-shirt for the one with most steps. Workers told me that they would work at that warehouse as long as Scott works there, and Scott has been there leading them for 4 years. In back of my mind I was thinking, what made Scott a great leader, is that he knew how to turn difficult tasks into games to motivate everyone, to make work fun. I witnessed gamification in practice!