Tata Interactive Systems

Banking on GamBLs™

Early November, in 2006, the eLearning team from ICICI Bank requested TATA Interactive Systems to recommend a training intervention program that would help make their people, involved in the Inward Clearing process, more efficient. One of their tasks involved spotting up to 18 potential discrepancies on each bearer cheque in less than 7 seconds to overcome the high volumes of transactions everyday. For the bank, an incorrect decision of passing or holding a cheque has severe regulatory, financial and legal implications. The need, as we saw it, was to entice their employees to demonstrate exceptional skills in the task.

Our solution, ‘Cheque-Mate’, was a skill-enhancer game designed around our Game Based Learning (GamBLs™) model. It put the player in an imaginary world where he/she was challenged to tag a series of correct and incorrect cheques according to an identified discrepancy in a limited time. The player would customize the game to match his/her ability using time and complexity controls at the start of the game. The player was scored on speed and accuracy of their decisions and recognition for good performance corresponded to the degree of challenge. The game used a dynamic data model that generated different data sets for every session to ensure replay-ability, another key attribute of GamBLs™.

The game was received with great enthusiasm by both the eLearning group and the employees of ICICI Bank. It also won the APEX Award this year.

In focus group testing, one of the players said,  “When I started, I could hardly find errors in a cheque, but after practice, I could track errors quite easily. So definitely playing over again I would look forward to improving my scores and reducing the errors.”

Another said, “It made me sit back and concentrate to ensure good scores.”
Since November, 2006, TATA Interactive Systems have created four highly engaging GamBLs™ for ICICI Bank and are in the process of developing four more around the roles of cashiers, back-end operations, Branch managers, customer sales representatives and sales representatives.

Mr. K. Ramkumar, Group Head – HR, ICICI Bank expressed his excitement about the role of gaming in his department vision for the future in an article that appeared in The Mint recently.

(Chandra Shekhar Ghildiyal is Deputy Head – Game-Based Learning at TATA Interactive Systems)

Gaming To Learn

The verdict seems to be out, well almost. Online games are serious business! And when it comes to helping students learn, that’s as serious as it gets. 

In a fascinating article titled ‘The Classroom of Popular Culture’ in Harvard Education Letter, James Paul Gee serves up a potpourri of game folklore, learning styles, and a flippant analysis of the so-called US outsourcing crisis. Yet, he still manages to provide a compelling proposition: If teachers and administrators were to consider principles involved in designing video games and apply those same principles to the classroom teaching experience, then learning would be so much more stimulating. Maybe like playing a video game?! 

For those of you who have been involved in designing the learning games developed by TIS over the years, reading the article might give a sense of déjà vu. Many of the principles that Paul talks about in his article (written in Dec 2005) seem to have been applied by our designers for around a decade now. For e.g.

• Game players needing to have strong identities
• Users need to be producers not just consumers of games
• Levels of difficulty
• Increasing competence through peer and expert advice 

It must be said that James Paul Gee is neither a crusader for games (games or nothing) nor is he specifically talking about the online learning experience. What he suggests is that some of the underlying philosophy on which today’s video games are based could be applied to the classroom. If you extend that argument, games could also be used to supplement or further the online learning experience. And that is exactly the principle on which TIS operates when it comes to designing learning games – it is always a game within a course and not a game as a course. 

I may not be able to link theory with fact and make a compelling case for this subject. But what I can tell you is this: If our High School teacher had followed up a lecture on angular velocity with a 15-min breakout session to play online snooker (maybe customized with controls to change mass/ radius), we may have learnt Physics differently. And possibly would have had fond memories of that high school teacher.

Disagree? Possibly agree? Comments welcome. 

I have mentioned many Learning Games in this piece. You can access some of these by clicking here.

(Sanjay Easwar is Project Manager with Tata Interactive Systems)