The gamification of continuous learning

I am a professional in the Tech Industry; a software developer to be more precise. In the 9 years of my career, continuous learning has been a constant throughout.

The Tech Industry has a fast-developing ecosystem. For example, Kotlin came out of seemingly nowhere, and suddenly became the recommended language for developing Android applications; first-class support for Kotlin was announced at Google I/O 2017.

Soon after, in 2018, Google launched Android Jetpack. Within a time lapse of just over a year:

• developers had to learn all of that Kotlin and Jetpack goodness, and
• organizations had to design a roadmap to migrate their now “legacy” apps to Google’s new Software Architecture best practices.

Fast-forward to 2021, and we as Android developers should probably get started with Jetpack Compose right about now. While still in beta, continuous learning means that we should get a head start playing around with that new technology.

How do you learn a new technology?

That was one of the questions on the recruitment questionnaire from my old job.

My answer was along the lines of:

• I read the official documentation,
• I find tutorials online,
• I look at existing repositories and try to reverse engineer, etc.

If I were to answer that same question again, the answer would be very different. In fact, I have an opportunity here to share with you, dear readers, the method I now use to learn a new technology.

It begins with the gamification of learning.

For example, if you have completed an Android Codelab in recent weeks, you will have noticed that, at the end, you unlocked a completion badge. This is akin to unlocking achievement trophies when playing your favorite video games.

It may not seem like much, but when applied to self-paced learning, it increases motivation and self-drive; personally, I get hooked on unlocking badges. Each time I do, I feel renewed motivation and a sense of achievement and satisfaction.

Another example, which is actually my favorite, comes from Codecademy.

On top of receiving a badge for each completed topic, Codecademy also provides a path’s progress bar that helps you estimate the amount of time and effort required to complete the study path; this trend in the online learning community is becoming the norm.

This formula is made up of 3 core components:

1. A series of articles, lessons, and tutorials that together makes a pathway of knowledge to a technology stack; the goal.
2. Achievement badges that unlocks at key moments when you complete tasks, such as completing a tutorial; the outcomes.
3. A progress bar that shows how far away you are from completing the course; the milestones.

The Gamification of my own learning paths

I recently completed the Learn Kotlin course on Codecademy. I realized, however, that its content is not enough for me to reach the level of proficiency that I am aiming at.

After doing some research, I settled on the following resources, which together give me the coverage I need to learn the topics that I find of interest:

• Codecademy’s Learn Kotlin course
• JetBrains Academy Kotlin developer track
• Exercism’s Kotlin track, and
• Kotlin Koans

To keep track of my goals, outcomes and milestones, I use Notion in a way that has been coined a Second Brain.

In a nutshell

I run each of the above resources as projects. I break down the work into a series of small tasks and run the projects using Scrum.

I schedule, prioritize and triage the tasks of each project during my sprint planning, which I usually do on a Sunday. For example, my scheduled sprint for the coming week looks like the screenshot below.

At a glance, I can immediately see what I will be focusing on for the coming week, i.e. Jetpack Compose and TypeScript.

On Monday, which is the first day of my weekly sprints, I can then tackle all the scheduled tasks with confidence and peace of mind. To illustrate the Kanban board, I have chosen to use the one from the previous week instead.

As I move tickets through their different stages, I update my Goals page accordingly. The feeling of achievement as I update my outcomes and see the percentage progress bar never fails to boost my motivation and confidence that I am heading in the right direction.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to know more about how you can apply this system to your continuous learning workflow, please do not hesitate to drop a comment down below and I will be in touch.