SweetRush was awarded the 2012 Brandon Hall Excellence Gold Award for Best Use of Games for Learning. The game, Tick Tock Tax, is a “pub trivia”-style game, designed to engage large groups and assess their knowledge during new-hire onboarding. The award highlights SweetRush’s work on the leading edge of adult learning, creative design, and technology, where the company has focused for over 11 years.
Tick Tock Tax, which also recently won Chief Learning Officer magazine’s Learning in Practice Certificate of Merit award, addresses a challenge common to intensive, multi-week, new-hire onboarding or similar programs: How do you keep learners engaged, review and reinforce what they’ve learned, and provide opportunities for networking and team-building? SweetRush capitalized on a client willing to explore alternatives and, after rounds of brainstorming with the client, chose to leverage the concept of the pub trivia game.
The company developed a customized game that has learners use their knowledge to help their team compete for first place. The high-energy format appeals to the young audience and reinforces the concepts learned and the value of team-based problem-solving. A big plus is giving new hires an up-tempo feeling about their newly adopted employer. The game is built to be easily modifiable, and the client continues to repurpose the game for new audiences.
“As all facets of the industry-wide technology infrastructure have matured, our 10-year commitment to building a strong engineering team, complemented with an equal focus on creative design, allow our instructional designers to now leverage all the tools and possibilities that can be used to change the behavior of client’s employees, and the Tick Tock Tax project is one reflection of this,” said Arturo Schwartzberg, SweetRush chairman, and co-founder.
