The rest of today is unwritten

Gamify! 4 reasons why, from my Gamification “class” homework

Professor Kevin Werbach @ The University of Pennsylvania is one of the best distance learning teachers I’ve ever had the privilege to learn from. Our Gamification class is so good that this is the 2nd time I’ve taken it. I feel pretty solid understanding the ideas behind gamification, but it’s awesome to reiterate solid principles and Werbach’s model.

Here’s the small homework assignment due today (italics), followed by my response:

You are an employee of Cereals Incorporated, a large manufacturer of breakfast food products.  Your supervisor, Madison County, approaches you because she knows you recently took a course on gamification, which she has heard will revolutionize marketing.

She tells you that Cereals Inc. is about to release a new line of ready-to-eat breakfast pastries, and she wants to know whether to use gamification as part of the marketing strategy.  The breakfast pastries will be aimed at the 18-35 age bracket. Surveys show members of this demographic often skip breakfast because they don’t want to eat the typical cereals of their youth, and they are too active to cook their own breakfasts.  Market research indicates that the pastries are likely to appeal more to women than men by a 65%-35% ratio. Cereals Inc. has a 35% share of the overall breakfast food market, but only a 10% share of the fragmented ready-to-eat segment. 

Provide as many reasons as you can why gamification could be a useful technique to apply to the situation your manager has presented to you.  Explain why these reasons address the specific scenario provided.  At this stage, focus on the problem rather than the solution.  In other words, describe the goals of the project, not the particular game elements or other techniques you plan to use.  We strongly encourage you to watch this week’s lecture segments before attempting this assignment.
 
Format: Maximum of 300 words.  A normal answer will be 1-2 paragraphs of text, and/or a set of bullet points.

My response:

Gamification could be incredibly useful to compliment marketing for the new line of ready-to-eat breakfast pastries. Here are four reasons why:

1. Our message could resonate with our demo’s lifestyle better than other choices. Because the 18-35 age bracket tends to be highly tech-oriented, gamification will resonate more than “traditional” media. Because they are active they’ll prefer to “do” gamification rather than passively consume traditional media.  This will also help demonstrate that Cereals Inc. and our new product line “gets them” and is a match for who they are.

2. We can truly engage our target demographic (demo) with our brand, and unobtrusively. By making breakfast food “fun”, we capture their attention and affiliation in a novel way that’s cool and unaligned with been-there-done-that cereals of their youth. Additionally we demonstrate respect for their busy lifestyle and facilitate their engagement in a way that meets their needs by leveraging technology that already accommodates their lifestyle vis-à-vis mobile, social networking or other similar.

3. We can tailor our message to what matters most to our female-dominant demo in a way that is superior to other methods. Women tend to be highly sociable. By gamifying we can meet their needs by connecting them with others, mostly women. They’ll share a common ground of enjoyable, interesting activities centered on their mutual interest of yummy foods for people on the go.

4. Gamifying marketing of the ready-to-eat breakfast pastries can grow more of our share of the ready-to-eat segment. Gamification typically has a beginning, middle and end, where participants often progress in an experience. This easily leads to other tie-ins and offshoots, like other ready-to-eat lines and even more of the breakfast food market as a whole.

Ready-to-eat breakfast pastries are the perfect line for gamification; let’s meet soon so I can provide details.

I’m thinking Google Glass may epitomize “disruptive” learning (& many other things)

Google released a full explainer video of Google Glass today. And wow. Here’s my initial take on why this could be a game-changer.

Imagine you have a sophisticated but tiny computer with you all the time. Actually many of us already do – smartphones! Google simply ups the ante. Now imagine having the benefits of the computer without needing to manhandle a device. Glasses you wear that project the “monitor” on to your eyes. You talk with your computer to direct it using Google’s version of Siri.

So learning, video, connecting, communicating – it’s all right there built-into your field of vision. I think the video below should be watched to really grasp the implications. The next stage would logically be contact lenses. Why would it not be? You control how much you use it, just like a phone, and it’s massively empowering to have knowledge and collaboration and communicating tools all rolled on-demand into your vision and control without needing to touch a thing. This is the beginning of great trend.

A MUST-watch (it’s long so I made this link start right where they demo Glass so you can see it in action & instantly “get it”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JpWmGX55a40#t=192s

Holy cow! IBM’s Watson has the knowledge of a medical school student, now the size of a pizza box. Implications:

OK, so pause and just think of the following not just in terms of medicine (which is amazing!) but also other fields: education, engineering, biology, etc…

IBM’s Watson kicked jeopardy champs’ butts, & we all got a cool quote out of it about welcoming our new computer overlords. But as we move on from this memeful moment in history and stopping thinking about it all, Watson’s still there, progressing, becoming inexorably smarter. It’s staggering to watch this unfold as Watson is now rolling out to the medical field. This is a bit of a tangential extension of my previous thoughts on Apple’s Siri.

According to some, health care pros make accurate treatment decisions only 50% of the time. Watson has shown the capability of being accurate in its decisions 90% of the time, although not yet near that level with cancer diagnoses. Patients need 100% accuracy of course, but making the leap from being right half the time to being right nine out of ten times will be a huge boon for patient care. The best part is the potential for distributing the intelligence anywhere via the cloud, right at the point of care. This could be the most powerful tool we’ve seen to date for improving care and lowering everyone’s costs via standardization and reduced error.

Watson has made huge strides in its medical prowess in two short years. In May 2011 IBM had already trained Watson to have the knowledge of a second-year medical student. In March 2012 IBM struck a deal with Memorial Sloan Kettering to ingest and analyze tens of thousands of the renowned cancer center’s patient records and histories, as well as all the publicly available clinical research it can get its hard drives on. Today Watson has analyzed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text, 25,000 training cases and had the assist of 14,700 clinician hours fine-tuning its decision accuracy. Six “instances” of Watson have already been installed in the last 12 months.

Watson doesn’t tell a doctor what to do, it provides several options with degrees of confidence for each, along with the supporting evidence it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. Doctors using an iPad can input a new bit of information in plain text, such as “my patient has blood in her phlegm,” and within half a minute Watson will come back with an entirely different drug regimen that suits the individual. IBM Watson’s business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance. That’s remarkable.

Imagine several years from now combining Watson version 7, with Siri version 9. “Siri, I’m not feeling that well can you help me…?” (yes, probably.)

Over the past two years, IBM’s researchers have shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to a pizza-box-sized server that can fit in any data center. And they improved its processing speed by 240%. Where will it be by 2020?

So coming full circle where will this (or, Watson’s cousins, similar programs) take us with education? Who knows. But imagine what this could do for third world countries as they access smart phones (coming soon.) It’s inspiring to imagine. We can only stay curious, hungry to learn, always learning, staying on top of trends and technology so we can help facilitate this. Let’s be ready.