Cloud Wars: Game-based Learning for Network Architecture
Arista Networks and SDN Pros
Arista Networks is an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large data center and routing environments. Arista’s award-winning platforms deliver availability, agility, automation, analytics, and security through an advanced network operating stack. SDN Pros, which provides network engineering training in the market, was founded, expanding and developing its role as Arista’s exclusive Elite Plus Training Partner.
Enable Education, with our decades of experience developing innovative training, partnered with SDN Pros and Arista to create a revolutionary game-based learning experience.
What Was the Challenge?
Many of Arista’s competitors are reliant on training that has changed little over the past two decades. Arista stands out from its competitors in terms of company culture, and as an industry leader, they wanted this to reflect in their training. Arista found that often people would complete their training but time would lapse between the learning and the application of the learning. They wanted a learning experience that could live between those two spaces and would allow learners to practice what they’ve learned in a risk-managed environment but with the real-world constraints of time pressure.
What Was the Process?
Working with Arista and SDN Pros was a collaborative endeavour that produced a learning experience that Enable is truly proud of. Using existing training content, Enable’s team extracted all the need-to-know learning to create the game.
The internal process of instructional, graphic, and game design involved lots of creative brainstorming and close collaboration that resulted in an engaging, fun, effective learning solution.
What Was the Solution?
Initially, the solution was envisioned, at a high level, to be an eLearning course, but after seeing the content and being inspired by the client’s needs, it evolved into something much more interactive!
As game enthusiasts, Enable’s game design and development team conceptualized a story-based puzzle game from the client’s existing network architecture course. The game’s story is recounted by a benevolent AI robot who has been paired with the player to restore a breached and damaged cloud network. Throughout the game, the AI robot accompanies and assists the player in a series of network architecture-based puzzles, which are all comprised of content from Arista’s existing network architecture course labs.
The game was designed with two primary goals in mind. The first was to lend an interactive space for learners to practice what they learned from the network architecture course, this time in an interactive, game-based space. The second was to elicit stronger knowledge retention by making the learning fun and engaging. An adjacent third goal was to design a game world and story that can be expanded to include the client’s numerous other courses in the future.
After each stage, which consists of several puzzle levels, the player is faced with a Boss Battle.
Boss Battles
The Boss Battles in the game were designed to seamlessly flow with the story of the game and provide a break between learning concepts. The battles purposely don’t contain any learning content to allow players to absorb what they’ve learned in the previous stage, while smoothly transitioning to the next stage.
Since the main story, atmosphere, and environment of the game are all cyber-future focused, the Boss Battles were all intentionally designed as adaptations of popular retro arcade games, including Pong, Frogger, Space Invaders, and Asteroids. The purpose was twofold: to contrast the modern age of computing, AI, and network architecture with retro beginnings, and to capture the attention of the different generations of learners in Arista's workforce.
“For me, the highlight was when we were showing this to our clients. At various stages, you have these very experienced, rough-and-tumble ex-military guys giggling at the retro games, and that validated the need for some competition, some time pressure, and some fun because otherwise, people just don’t do the thing”
If you’d like to chat about learning experience design, gamification, or how Enable can help you begin your organization’s learning journey, schedule a call with one of our team.