Abstract:

Introduction:
When we start a new activity, it’s easy to get bored quickly. However, engagement and motivation are essential to accomplishing achievements that require long lasting effort and discipline. The term “engagement” has become very popular in the last few decades, as intellectual, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive factors increase awareness and play an essential role in enhancing the learning process.

The purpose:
Since engagement and motivation are key factors in learning, how can we embed motivational strategies and engagement theories into the learning process? In this statement we will discuss how SkillGym methodology has created a learning approach that keeps trainees engaged for the entire program’s duration.

The training:
SkillGym is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven digital role-play game. It allows users to train soft skills that are related to emotional intelligence abilities and identified in the main empowerment areas in corporate environments. The digital role-play allows users to practice emotionally charged, life-like critical conversations in the workplace. Using AI technology, real-time conversations take place in different scenarios with different characters who have different goals based on personality, psychology, and neuroscientific findings. Employers and employees can safely explore and practice different solutions and problem-solving strategies in a goal-oriented and contextualized setting.

Motivational strategies:
The training method has been built to actively work on motivational systems by using various theoretical frameworks. The sense of achievement, need for content, and relevance of the task are supported in many ways by the method. The need for sense of achievement includes: different feedback supplied during the training including emotional strategies, quantitative feedback (Key Performance Indicators), and qualitative and social feedback (Empowering Sessions). Providing feedback through different channels can reward learners through emotional, cognitive, and social channels, therefore empowering the sense of achievement. The need for sense of competence is supported by balancing the game challenges against player skill. The need for content: the specialized and specific contest where the role-playing game acts is an important element in maintaining a high-level of interest in the situation. Indeed, the role-play resemblance to real life makes it extremely interesting and useful for the users since they need to learn how to handle those situations in real life. The level of difficulty and challenge in each role-play simulation has been specifically studied to keep the right balance between the already well-known information and the new one to learn, providing the opportunity to explore new strategies and solutions in a safe environment. This ensures that high attainment, utility, and intrinsic value are maintained with a low perceived cost. The keys to engage: We believe that two of Lazzaro’s four keys might be related to the SkillGym role-play game: the easy fun and the serious fun.

Conclusion:
We argue that this digital role-play game is an engaging training method. The different tools specifically created (Butler, Empowering Sessions, Specific Feedback) can efficiently work on human motivational systems and keep a high level of engagement in trainees for the entire duration of the program, therefore enhancing the learning process.

Keywords:

Role-play game, engagement, motivation strategies, digital learning.