Kumar Dattatreyan (00:10):
Hey, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Azure Meridian, and I'm joined by my colleague, partner, and, and good buddy Chris Daley. And we are gonna talk about, you know what, I'm not really sure what we're gonna talk about. Uh, I think it has something to do with Minecraft, and you're probably wondering what does Minecraft have to do with Agile, uh, Chris, what does Minecraft have to do with Agile?
Chris Daily (00:37):
That's a good question. You know, one of the things that I did, uh, I've done for years is in Scrum, in my scrum training class, when we're training Scrum masters or teams, I would use Legos. And we would go through and we would, we'd go through the curriculum, right? And we'd talk about what a scrum master is and a sprint planning and all that stuff. And then we would break up into teams and we would go up and I would create a backlog and we would create an integrated city. So I might have three or four teams, and they'd be building their, they would be building, each one would take a, a sticky note, right? And they'd go off and they'd build a jail, or they'd build a, a hospital, or they build a two story house, or a one story house. And we'd walk through the scale, you know, uh, there's a couple dynamics there in addition to the team, right?
(01:26):
So you've got multiple teams coming together, and they would, you know, and, and invariably one would make a house three blocks high, and another would make it eight blocks high. And you'd have to talk through about how, okay, now we need to agree on what scale is and how that works. You know, we'd need to, we'd go through and we'd have to talk about, you know, how getting 'em in there, right? The, the necessity to take a little bit of time to integrate, to make sure everything works. And, and, you know, it would, it would give them an opportunity to go through and try to learn how to do Scrum, right? And so we would do that, and it was always fun. Well, when we got hit with a virtual, you know, when we got hit with Covid and everybody was forced to go virtual, I've been struggling to figure out a way to do that exercise.
(02:14):
'cause you know, the, the Lego exercise is really kind of fun. And it's, it's interesting to see what they do with what you give 'em. I happen to have two tubs about yay big, and, you know, yay tall, full Legos and plates and everything. And we'd go, we'd, we'd spend days. I actually got, became known as the Lego man at one of the, uh, academies I was teaching at, you know, where I'd go in and I'd do a, a one day scrum class, and we'd spend the first half day reviewing, talking about Scrum. And then second half of the day, we'd spend playing games and doing Legos. And, um, so I've struggled with that, and I've always been focused on trying to find something that we could use that was kind of a, an open space type where you could go in and just craft, right?
(03:01):
You didn't have to fit within their constraints. They'd have constraints, but where you could just go in and just do something and, and basically have a sandbox that they could go in and play. And I was doing some research, and I started out doing a lot of work around a tool called Gather Town, which you're familiar with Kumar, right? You, you introduced me actually to gather Town back when I was, uh, a couple years ago when I joined Meridian. And we were talking about using it and how we might use it for a class. And so I was good thinking about using that as a , it's construct a town. Yep.
Kumar Dattatreyan (03:39):
Maybe it'd be, uh, useful just to talk about what Gather Town is just for a a minute, just in case people don't know. Of course, you can always look at the show notes, get a link for it and see, but what is Gather Town? Chris
Chris Daily (03:51):
Gather Town is a tool that allows you to be able to use a pixelate. You create your own little pixelated character, and then you move around town. And as you're going, as you're moving around, you're moving in, in and out of spaces. You can go into a building, when you go in the door of the building, you can go into a room, right? That's decorated. Maybe it's a library, or maybe it's a doctor's office or what, you know, whatever you want to do, you can get, um, you can, sometimes they'll have game areas, game pavilions. They'll have game events where you can go and do little things. You can get yourself in a little car and putter around town and things like that. And it, what it does is it allows you to be able to create a space that people can operate in. If you think about a virtual conference, right?
(04:40):
You might have five different, you might have five different, uh, meetings going on at the same time, five different sessions. And, and so how in Zoom you do, you know, you can go in and you can pick your rooms, right? And have breakout rooms. But with Gather Town, you literally move your character to the room. And when you get close to a character like you and I do, then my microphone turns on and your microphone turns on, we can just have a conversation rather than having to go to a room or you're stuck with chat. So it's really kind of this interactive little tool, and you can build your own space with it. So you can using, you know, essentially, you know, the, the same kinds of technology that they use in Minecraft and others, you can use that same technology and build your own talents. Yes, I feel like I'm in
Kumar Dattatreyan (05:28):
School. I would say that, that, uh, I don't, I don't wanna just interrupt you. That would be rude. , especially when you're on a roll. It's just you and I. But, uh, but it was developed, uh, by, I forget what university, but they used it, uh, during Covid, uh, to hold classes in, in that university. So it's a great alternative to Zoom and teams and all these things because it introduces the illusion, if you will, of movement. So you, you're, you embody this avatar and you can kind of move around. And like you said, when you get close to someone, you see them and you can talk to them. And when you start to move away, first you, their image fades out and then their voice fades away, just like in the real world, right? Um, yeah. So it was, it is pretty cool. I, I like, I really liked it. So what does this have to do with Minecraft?
Chris Daily (06:13):
Well, I gotta, I'm part of a grant through, uh, we got, we Agile Meridian got in as part of a grant with the IU I U P U I school of, uh, informatics, which is known as the Ludy School. And so as part of that grant, we're working with sixth to eighth graders. And so, you know, I was trying to figure out, okay, now what do I do? Gather town's really complex and I stumbled across Minecraft education. And, and so what we're gonna do, and actually it's good timing. We're according this, 'cause this is a, you know, this is, by the time this gets out, we're actually gonna be doing it. I'm starting on Monday, we're actually gonna be working with six to eighth graders, and we're going to use, yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it is really cool. And, and we're going to use this, this Minecraft education version and take them through how to build a product and take them through our product journey loop of why are you building this thing?
(07:19):
Who are you building it for? You know, we're gonna talk about what the options are, um, figuring out, you know, where, how you're gonna build it, and then actually get into building it. And we're gonna use a BA sprint backlog, we're gonna use sprints. Um, we're gonna use a demo, and they're actually gonna show it. So we've actually built in all of the things that we would teach in the, in, in our, uh, the product mindset class. I've built all, we're building all that and using that inside of, or most of it, inside of this Minecraft game with these six to eighth graders. And the ultimate idea is that we will take this con once we vet out this process and concepts and make sure it works, that the thought is that we could build a, I like to think of it like a, a museum, right?
(08:10):
Where you go into a museum and you see various things. We can build an interactive way for people to go in and do the, you know, go in using the tab, using a tablet or a Chromebook or a laptop, go in and actually learn about Agile and Scrum, and then go off and build it together. That's, and you know, it, it's really interesting, you know, you and I have had these conversations a little bit about, you know, engaging people, right? That's one of the things that we're both kind of interested in, in terms of courses and workshops. How do you engage people? How do you get 'em to be, um, how do you get them so that they're, they're, they, they just, they don't wanna leave and they love what they're doing, and they, and they're at the same time. And what's really interesting about this is that my generation, you know, is one where, you know, my favorite, my first video game was Pong, right?
(09:05):
I think I've talked about that in another video. Um, you know, and so for me, I'm not as hooked on games and cell phones and those kind of things, but the kids, the, the people that are coming up behind us, right? The, the 15 year olds, the 10 year olds up through the 35 to 40 year olds are gamers, right? And so, this environment of taking a, something that is, you know, Minecraft, which is known throughout the world, right? There's millions of people that know how to play Minecraft, hundreds of millions of people. And if we can figure out a way to use this as an educational tool, the possibilities for this are just phenomenal. It also leads us into a different, us being you and I and agile meridian, it leads us from the traditional way of doing a course of, you know, we're gonna have the intro, we're gonna have an ice intro, an icebreaker, you know, we're gonna do these things in day one, these things in day two, these things in day three, and make it more of a adventure for the mm-hmm. for our learners, right? That they're gonna be learning at their own pace and their own discovery versus it being you and I pontificating what they should believe, right? Yeah. We're gonna let them actually go in and do it.
Kumar Dattatreyan (10:31):
Yeah. That's amazing. I, I love the idea of it, and I know we've talked about it before, so I'm not, I'm not completely clueless, um, except, um, I'm kind of clueless, but not completely clueless about what you're doing with my, and I think, I think that it's, it's, uh, really does indulge or involve the learner at a different level than a a than a normal course. You know, one of the things that I've been doing for years is trying to figure out as you have, how to involve the learner as much in the learning process. Uh, because, you know, most courses, the stuff, the courses that stuck with me are because of the instructor, not because of the content. Uh, and, and what I mean, what I mean by that is the instructor made it so the facilitator made it so, so that us, the learners were involved in some activity. And so we learned from the experience of, of the activity more so than from the instructor. And the instructor was able to flow seamlessly to facilitate the learning, uh, that we were going through by suggesting something or by guiding us in a certain way or a certain thing. And I, and I wonder how will that translate to a virtual environment like Minecraft and Gather Town?
Chris Daily (11:40):
It will, I think I, the, the best example I have is I prototyped this in spring, at Spring Break with a group of students for two hours. And in this particular case, you know, for you and I, it's been a while since we've had six to eighth graders, right? It's been that before we've had that kids at that age in our house, and it's completely d it was com You know, during this week of Spring break where I participated in these workshops, it was, it was crazy. The kids were running everywhere. You had a hard time controlling, you had a hard time keeping their attention. And all of a sudden we took this and we gave them the, we gave them the devices, and the, the volume in the room went way down. And the conversation changed from, you know, one guy punching his buddy, right?
(12:33):
Another dude, and then somebody making fun of their friend and another person on the phone. All of a sudden, they're all on these tablets we were using at the time, and they're engaged in what they're doing. And they got through, I mean, we used as a, just as a prototype, I use the net, uh, they've got a, a digital citizen, uh, lesson that is really good, right? Mm-hmm. and these guys, all these guys don't have digital citizens, they citizen backgrounds, right? They don't really understand about sharing information like passwords and, you know, their phone numbers and stuff like that. So I, I had, I used that as an example, as a prototype, and they went through it and they were able to get through it said, an hour and a half to two hours, and about half the class got through it in an hour. Mm-hmm. I mean, they, they, they engaged, they learned when they got done, we talked about what they learned and it was, they, they had it. I mean, the, if we can just figure out a way to harness the, the brain of our learners in a way where they can, where it's fun to learn, it's not learning anymore, right? It's playing a game. Yeah. And we can build it into that. Well, you know, we can go ahead. Sorry.
Kumar Dattatreyan (13:52):
I was just gonna say, gamification is, is is all the rage, you know, it has been for a while. In fact, our, the social media companies out there that have been using gamification for, for a decade or more, you know, how did Facebook, uh, hook, uh, hook a whole generation of users is through, it's through gamification. It's through that social reward mechanism where you're rewarded from by your friends and the people in your circle for the things that you say and you do. And of course, that feeds, that's sort of a, a, a virtuous or, or maybe vicious cycle depending on, on your, um, on your, uh, opinion of Facebook, uh, to, uh, , right? To keep engaging in the, in the community, and to keep sharing and keep, keep wanting to get those likes and, and those types of things. And so it's trying to figure out how to use gamification and, and learning in a way that is, again, not, not nefarious in any way, but that enhances the learning and, and, and, and helps people remember what they learned. I wonder, I'm curious why you chose to use a virtual simulation in a real life classroom of sixth graders.
Chris Daily (15:02):
Well, I, it wasn't by choice. 'cause I started out with, I started, I mean, we literally, I literally drug, I literally dusted off the boxes of Legos and took them in and we did those. And it was, it kept 'em engaged for 20 minutes, right? But then their friend, they'd see their friend go by and their friend would say, come on, let's go play basketball. And they'd go, right, because you couldn't, I can't very well chain 'em to the desk. Yeah. It's kind of illegal . And so, you know, as I was trying to do, as I, as I'm trying to figure this out, you know, uh, it, it just, I was really lucky, like I said, I started with, with Gather Town as a way to approach it. And, and again, thinking about it all through Covid, about how do we do this virtually?
(15:48):
How do you do this great exercise? Virtually it just go, you know, you point me in the direction of Gather Town and then gather town not working, being more complex to build. And it took, it takes a while to get up to speed on it, right? Just like any other tool. And Minecraft, a lot of these kids know how to do Minecraft. They've been playing Minecraft. So, uh, we, we added an intern who, I'm not sure I'm at liberty to say in a recording, right? But I've got an intern working with me. And, you know, we didn't, the the time it takes, you'd normally take getting some up to speed is virtually non-existent. 'cause he steps right in, and he knows he did all the Minecraft exercises. He's building his own castle right now. He's gonna, he went with me today when we went to, to talk, you know, we went through the, the, the, the onboarding process right at the community center we're doing this at, and he just steps right in, right? I mean, it was very, very easy. It was easy for him to understand, and it was in a platform he's familiar with. So
Kumar Dattatreyan (16:57):
That's really, uh, very interesting to me. I'm, I'm so eager to see the results of the, um, of next week and how you use it. Um, but more, more importantly, I think it, it's gonna be a smashing success with the kids because they, uh, the kids are, they've grown up in this virtual world. They're familiar with all of these tools. They, you know, kids play games. I mean, my kids, they're older now. They're young men, really, but they're still very much, uh, gamers at heart, you know, and, and, uh, the younger ones certainly. So, right. They're very, very familiar with these tools, and they can pick it up real quick. But I'm curious, you know, is this a platform, do you think that might work with adults? You know, professionals that, uh, if we try to engage them in, in using tools like Gather Town and Minecraft to learn complex, uh, complex, some things of complexity, like, like our product journey loop, you brought that up and, you know, we'll include a link to a video as to what that is down in the show notes. But as actually going through the, the, the product cycle, uh, the, uh, development cycle of, uh, it's, you know, it combines parts of design thinking and parts of, of product delivery itself, product development and delivery. And, but in very iterative cycle of, of doing that, do you think that would be something that would work with adults?
Chris Daily (18:20):
Depends, right? I give the typical of consultant cancer. It depends for somebody who is like me, like my, like my friends, right? I've got some friends that are right at my age that are three years away from retirement. No, right? Yeah. That's not, we're not, we're going after this type of an approach because it, not because of where we are, it's where the market's moving, right? And the way education is moving, and you know, in, you know, five years ago you couldn't afford to be our headset, right? And I got one hanging right over here that I play golf on all the time, right? Instead of getting my fat butt out to go play to the golf course, it's like a mile away. I stay in my house and play virtual golf. You, it's mo things are moving that way. And so, you know, with us and, and being Meridian, right, we're focused on trying to meet the needs of our clients today.
(19:21):
But the analogy I use for us, for us, when it comes to these kind of things is that, you know, Wayne Gretzky once was asked, how is it that you're so great at hockey? How is it you're always able to score? And, uh, and I'm paraphrasing now, but his comment was, most people skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck's gonna be. Right? And that's really what this is. We're really, you know, my passion about this is where we're gonna be going forward and where things are gonna be so that we're being agile, Meridian are able to go and, and do this and be there as part of the, the change that's occurring. Right? And, you know, another shameless plug, we're trying to be disruptors rather than being disrupted. Yeah. Right? So we wanna be, we want to be one of 'em that's out there talking about it and, and moving the needle forward.
(20:17):
So I think it's gonna make, I think it, I really do think it's where things are going. Now, is it gonna be Minecraft? It's probably not. It's gonna be in a virtual reality headset. You know, it could be in a network of, uh, a number of network devices that are hooked together in virtual reality, whether it's computer or whatever. Um, but I, that's really where I think things are going. And you know, if you, as you know, this grant that we got is for under-resourced folks, right? Mm-hmm. , it's for under-resourced six to eighth graders. It's in one of the less privileged areas of Indianapolis, and that's who we're working with mm-hmm. . And, um, you know, when you think about the, you know, in corporate America, it's great when you've got somebody that will pay the $1,200 for the class for you to go attend, right? But what do you do if you're, if you don't have access to that, how do we help them? And, you know, I think it, it makes, takes the, it's, it's probably not, I don't think it'll be as effective as a one-on-one training, but I think it's got other aspects that are very valuable. Like, for example, you can start and stop. You can do a little bit of work on it yourself, and then you can stop and you can, you know, you can come back to it tomorrow. We can do it remotely too. Or
Kumar Dattatreyan (21:33):
You could, you could do, yeah. Or you could do, you could assign asynchronous work. So they do some, some things on their own, or they work with their little group, their cohort, their team to build something, and then you come together in, uh, uh, to review what they've done, provide some lectures, some instructions, some guidance, which is a lot what a lot of the training is moving to, to your point, even in the adult learning space, right? So cohort-based training programs are, are quite popular. In fact, you know, we we're doing that now with our leadership program, as you know, and, and our, and we're probably gonna be moving our Coaching Pro programs that way as well. So, so that people can immerse themselves more in the learning. And, and I'm really excited about, about this. And by the way, we aren't the first to use Minecraft and, and adult education.
(22:20):
Uh, Peter Merrill from X Scale has been using it for a few years, a couple years now, uh, for, there's a game that X plays, it's called, uh, game Without Thrones, or a Game with, uh, yeah. A Game Without Thrones or something like that. Uh, and, and basically the premise of the game, you know, to play on the show, the Game of Thrones, is that, uh, that, you know, in an agile environment, you don't need commanders or kings or queens to be in a throne. It's, it's an autonomous culture that really thrives. And so in his game, it's really teams of people using, in this case, Minecraft to build a castle and integrate their castles into a, into a system of castles. Kind of like the Lego City game that you used to play back in the day when you used to teach in a, in a, in a real classroom.
(23:11):
And, uh, he's been quite successful at doing that. I was actually, I participated in some of those, so I don't know if he was a pioneer, but he certainly has been using it for a while. So it might be worthwhile checking with him to see how this Yeah. Platform might work for adult learners. Now, you know, all the people that came to the, the, the conference to play the game, were kind of geeks like Peter is, and like I am, and like you are. But what about all the people that aren't, you know, , how do you get them trained on using these tools?
Chris Daily (23:40):
Well, that's, you know, well, first of all, Minecraft you can download, right? So they can download Minecraft and they can do it themselves. There are hundreds of lessons in Minecraft Education Edition. And, and so you can have people go in and do those lessons as what I did is I had them go through di Digital Citizenship and then go through privacy, cyber privacy, right? Mm-hmm. . So the kids that weren't familiar with Minecraft got familiar with it, right? Yeah. They're playing the game, they're working, and it, and then what I, well interestingly, I saw, which I'm sitting here thinking, okay, these kids are gonna be into it and they're gonna, you know, the ones that are gonna struggle are gonna struggle. And what we saw was the ones who were really good at it were helping the ones who hadn't, weren't very familiar with it, right?
(24:33):
Mm-hmm. . And if you think about the real world, we all don't come in at an expert level. We come in with a junior developer, maybe a junior tester, you know, a senior product architect, whatever the titles are, we bring together, and they all have to pitch in and help each other. And so what happened is they started building empathy with each other and building relationships with each other, which is, you know, that's, that's, that's again, as part of the, the Lego game. And we're able to do that as part of the, um, you know, as part of building the castle or building, you know, whatever. Yeah. Whatever, you know, whether they're building an amusement park or whatever they might be doing. Yeah. What's interesting too, is taking it one step further and making it not just the building side, but making it the educational side.
(25:22):
So, you know, the five, five team members go through the museum or whatever, and learn scrum and learn the basics of it together, and then go off and do it. You really, again, shift it from, shift it from, you know, us to, to somebody else that really, it kind of, it, you know, you were describing where you said, you know, they, they do some, they're gonna go off and do some activities, and then they come back. That's really the flipped classroom approach, right? Yeah. It's, yeah. Or the other way we know it the other way professionally, we know it is, uh, training from the back of the room. Correct. Right. The Sharon Bowman book, um, where you try to get people where they spend their time out learning on their own, and then they come back and the projects are actually done together.
Kumar Dattatreyan (26:12):
Yeah. We're doing that now, by the way. I mean, you know, that we're doing that now with our leadership program and our agile fundamentals and, and things like that. I'm wondering if our platform, uh, you know, our community platform and our training platform is something where we can experiment using Minecraft, uh, and provide some, some training, uh, some, some, some kind of course work for adults and see how it works using Minecraft and, and Gather town as an experiment, you know? Yeah. Uh, that would be really cool to do, get some data
Chris Daily (26:43):
We're looking for. Um, you know, and I started doing that. I started making some posts about, into the community about what do you think about this? Right? Not, not necessarily posting as community resources, but asking people what they, what do you think about this? Does this make sense to you? Right, yeah. Being come with almost like the, the beta tester, and you and I had talked about taking some of these courses and making 'em available, and I, I absolutely believe that that would be a great way to get feedback. I mean, we've got a pretty big community in terms of the number of people we've got, you know, and if we could get a subset of them to be able to come in and do that and, and help us with that, I think that'd be great. You know, another opportunity for us is I've been thinking about restarting the Agile games, indie, uh, meetup group, and that might be another opportunity for us to go in and actually, you know, get some people that are interested, get 'em together, get some feedback, get, and, and by doing that, get some evangelists out there about what we're doing.
Kumar Dattatreyan (27:45):
Absolutely. Well, we're coming up on close to 30 minutes here on our Agile Not so short, uh, video. This is , but this has been really fun talking about this, and it is, it is getting my, my, the gear is turning in my head as to how to use these tools. I'm wondering if, uh, maybe we can, uh, schedule our next video, uh, and actually make it, uh, make it a sort of a live event. And, um, although these are, you know, kind of live, make our next event a live event where we do something small using, uh, Minecraft and see how that goes. Yeah.
Chris Daily (28:25):
Yeah. I think that'd be great. I, I would, you know, I, as far as I'm concerned, this is what I like doing. I mean, yeah. You know, gamification and trying to figure all this out. I mean, it, it blends a nice world of the tech of how, how you're gonna do this along with, uh, you know, with the business side of, you know, how do you actually run a team? How do you, how do you work together as a team and build something, right? Yeah. And how do you learn from financial? So it's kind of got the best of both worlds
Kumar Dattatreyan (28:53):
For me. Yeah, exactly. And there's so many things you can use it for, you know, you could have lessons around leadership and short little lessons around leadership and have some discussions around that, or product building, or, uh, you name it. Uh, it, it certainly, uh, has application. Well, anyway, we could talk all day about this. I'm, I'm, I'm sure as passionate as you and I are about this topic, we would talk all day about this
Chris Daily (29:15):
. Yeah. I would enjoy that
Kumar Dattatreyan (29:18):
. Yeah. But we should probably end okay. The call here soon. So, uh, thanks for watching everyone, and we'll have, uh, uh, some links to, uh, the p j l, the product journey loop. Uh, so you, you'll see what that's about, and also links to join our community. And if you're interested in, in volunteering to help us, you know, test this concept, build this concept, uh, please join our community, our, it's a private community, and, and we'll be really happy and thrilled to have you in there. So, any, any party
Chris Daily (29:50):
Thoughts you might wanna throw in there, you might wanna throw in that you can join first. 30 days are free.
Kumar Dattatreyan (29:56):
Absolutely right. Well, the, the, the, the community as a whole is free, but then we have, we do have some, some channels within it that are paid, like our leadership channel and our, uh, coaching channel. And so if you decide to join, it's always free. The free parts are free, and there's a lot to, to get in the free parts of the community, which includes tons of material and content and, and access to videos. All right. Anything to add, Chris?
Chris Daily (30:23):
Nope, I'm good. All right. Thanks for letting me orient.
Kumar Dattatreyan (30:26):
Of course. So you gotta hit the,
Chris Daily (30:29):
There we go.
