The other day I was having an interesting conversation with my peers on Quora on the topic of merging Gamification and Lego, I know it sounds li’l offbeat but the idea stuck me with an interesting concept, which I thought of jotting them down in a structured form.
Think for a second of measuring the daily todo list with lego bricks, stacking one over the other with different colors and forming an architectural structure. Let’s make it simpler, take a look at the following example.
I have my todo list in front of me. As I finish each task, I add logo brick on flat surface. Each task has a second level to it, so I add another brick on the previously laid stack. I have used color-coding corresponding to each level. For example, the first level is yellow then green, followed by blue and finally red.
Now take a hypothetical task of writing a very well research piece on Gamification involving the following chronological steps:
1) Ideation- during ideation, we just create a flat surface for laying our lego bricks.
2) Data mining: once we have done with researching the data, we would be placing the first ‘yellow’ layer and then move onto the next task in line.
3) Content: this level involves putting down words or the content to the line of thought in a structured format taking inspiration and statistical info from the previous set of data. Once it is accomplished, we would pile on ‘green’ blocks on the yellow ones.
3) Proof reading: after the feature or the report is completed, we need to proof read it to omit any errors. ‘Blue’ blocks are then added once our article has passed through the proof reading sequence.
4) Promotion: Promoting content through social media is an important part of content creation. At time virality ignites more ideas for content creation, the comments and feedbacks are an important ingredient for any content house. Hence, promoting the content across social networks, bookmarking and forum submission forms the last and major element for almost all the media houses. So when we’d finish off with the promotion part of the content, we would add ‘red’ bricks to our lego building.
This was the sequence of tasks in one of the todo list. We need to work simultaneously on the tasks involved in the second todo list.
Let’s say we need to create an infographic on the piece on Gamification. We would be skipping the first level and start with the second level that is data mining. As we pass through the levels, we keep on adding the colored bricks next to the each corresponding laid bricks.
One of its interesting outcome is, we can see our growth simultaneously in form of a lego building.
Adding another Dimension
If we add another dimension called time, it will look all the more exciting. I mean, peers or colleagues can look across to see how tall or how many buildings their counterparts have made in the same time frame.
I think if we track our time and tasks on lego bricks, it will work wonders, although it is just an idea and I have just started working on it. But I can bet like any Gamification strategy this one if polished can do magic and infuse employees in creating a dynamic work space as well.
