In my previous job, I had facilitated a training session on Git for my team. Given this is a technical subject, I was totally aware that it would be ultra boring if the training content just had slides, screenshots or even live demos. So, I gamified the training to engage the participants and it was nice to see them enjoy the whole process.
Oh, and this would work even better in a virtual setup where participants are joining via a Zoom/Google Meet/any conferencing platform.
I hope you’d enjoy reading or may be even applying this too!
Table of Contents
Game Objective
All the participants should work together to guess the word or set of words chosen by the facilitator, within a set time.
Game Setup
- As a facilitator, create a separate repo for this game on GitHub or Bitbucket or any other cloud code hosting service your company uses. Create this in advance and ensure the players have access to clone, push and merge to the remote repository.
- The facilitator provides every participant, separately, a secret letter and a number. The letter will be part of the word/set of words they have to get to finish the game. And, the number is the position of the letter in the final word.
Try to choose a word that is not easy to guess, if you have a few letters of it. I had chosen the word NONGRIAT for my game. So, each player, separately, is given these secret codes – N1, O2, N3, G4, R5, I6, A7, T8.
Choose your favorite word/set of words depending on the number of players.
Nongriat is a beautiful village in the north eastern part of India, in the state of Meghalaya. It is most famously known for its living root bridges, especially the double decker living root bridges! There is also a trek that leads you to a stunning Rainbow Falls! (image at the top of this page) Text me if you are interested to know more 🙂
- Have a timer. I used 40 mins for a group of 8 folks. You may just type “start timer for 40 mins” on Chrome browser to start one.
- Find a volunteer for the group, to do the final arrangement of letters.
The Game
The only way a player can reveal the secret code given to him/her is by
- cloning the repository set for the game from remote to their local computer
- Create a branch with their own name
- Create a new .txt file, say harish.txt
- git add the new harish.txt file
- Type in your secret code in the file and save
- git commit the file with a meaningful commit message
- push the file to remote
Now, since the time is ticking, players who finish publishing their secret code to remote should help the rest of the players who might be stuck at some step to complete their process.
Facilitators can step in where needed, to nudge them to next steps and hold up the activity.
When everybody has published their secret codes onto remote, say GitHub, the volunteer then arranges the letters and announces the word back to the facilitator to validate.
The group wins if the word is correct and guessed in time!!
Tweaks
- You could add more fun by not giving the numbers, but just the letters, to allow them to discuss and arrange to make the right word.
- Or, you may create the setup such that, some of the players get to hit a merge conflict and everyone gets to see how to resolve it, to move ahead.
Hope you will play this fun game with your team to learn Git. Leave your thoughts and comments below, about how it worked for you!
Do check out my page on A Simple Introduction to Git, if you haven’t already.
