Do you need a new, unique way to train or upskill your team? Are those PowerPoint presentations just not cutting it anymore? A digital matching game can provide your learners with a fun, fast-paced, and engaging experience with your training materials.
Despite what your kitchen cupboards or teenagers’ floor may suggest, we humans love order and completion. We’ll finish things we don’t love – like a bad movie – for the sake of completing them. Also, is there really anything better than a clean, organized kitchen? Maybe a clean and organized teenager’s floor.
It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most popular games in the world, Candy Crush, harnesses this desire for order and completion. The rules of the game are so simple that toddlers can play. Simply match 3 similar icons or items to make them disappear, gain points, and progress to the next level.
In other words “tidy up” the board in front of you for a sense of order, accomplishment, and some exciting bonuses or animations.
Play a demo on the importance of upskilling and get in on the action!
Why Match Games are Effective
If you’re not a Candy Crush person, Tetris is another game that harnesses this power.
By simply creating a complete line from mishappen blocks you remove that line, earn points, “tidy up”, and move on to the next level. And, if you’re like us, you’d do that for hours and hours while running out the battery on your Game Boy.
If you’re worried that these games will be too addictive or encourage bad habits in your learners, we’ve recently added a feature to combat this worry. You can now add session limits for your learners. Check out the screenshot below to see how the sessions can be limited.
Matching games are so effective they can border on addiction. You can limit the number of sessions your learners can play, what times, etc. to address this concern.
These games are simple, rewarding, encourage repeat interaction, and can help you on your journey to becoming a training hero. So, as an educator or instructional designer, how can you harness the power of these highly addictive – in all the good ways – games for your training purposes?
Making Matching Games Educational
It’s hard enough to get students to pay attention to, well, anything these days. As an instructional designer or educator, you can harness the engaging power of games like Match and Candy Crush by adding your training material to the game.
Unlike Tetris or Candy Crush, in Match, players can earn powerups and bonuses for answering questions correctly before entering the game. This will give them points and special abilities that can help them progress to the next level.
Players can answer questions in either multiple choice, multiple select, picture-matching, text-input, or a polling format; giving you tons of options as a trainer when creating the game.
You can also add feedback to your questions to further educate and reinforce material about the questions. Like everything in The Training Arcade®, the question types, and amount of training content is fully customizable to meet your needs.
Include pictures in your questions to further engage your learners, or, provide a hint to the questions answer.
Let us “Reskin” Your Game to Match Your Company’s Branding
If you’re looking to take customization to the next level in your Match game, look no further. We can reskin the entire game to fit your brand, logo, or products.
IT Cosmetics used The Training Arcade® to create training games – one of which was Match – to help train their growing international sales team on new products. For Match, they turned those products into the icons that are matched up in the game!
Not only were they driving home important information through power-up questions, but they were also reinforcing what their products looked like through interactions with their likeness. The sales team was able to learn, engage, retain, and have fun all at the same time.
We can reskin Match to, ahem, match the style, brand, or products of your company.
Microlearning, Repeat Play, and Retention
Games like Match are most effective because they encourage repetition and re-engagement with training material. This leads to the magic word, retention.
Because Match is fast-paced, learners can quickly engage with training material in bite-sized portions which make it digestible and retainable. This idea of quick and digestible learning is referred to as “microlearning” and is especially favored by tech-savvy GenZ.
Depending on how many questions you create, players may interact with the same questions several times in a single session. This gives the player a sense of safety knowing that if they get the question wrong, they’ll soon enough have another chance to get it right.
Plus, correctly answering the same questions several times in a short period, you guessed it, drives retention and a sense of accomplishment.
Gamify Your Training
Gamification has been proven to increase the effectiveness of your training by encouraging engagement, repetition, and fun! Match is well suited for learners like GenZ who prefer quick, digestible microlearning.
Anyone, though, can enjoy the satisfaction of answering questions for powerups and for “tidying up” a game board.
We can guarantee your learners will come back for more gameplay and learning. If only we could also guarantee your teenager will clean their bedroom.
