We helped AKD Solutions take its corporate training program online, resulting in:
AKD Solutions offers Equally Yours, a board game-based training program designed to promote inclusion and open dialogue in corporate environments. Traditionally conducted in person, the game is moderated and played in teams, encouraging participants to engage with real-world social dilemmas.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, AKD faced a major disruption:
To address these challenges, AKD sought to transform the Equally Yours experience into an engaging, web-based application. They reached out to GoodCore to develop this web application.
The project entailed the following requirements:
The web app for Equally Yours works exactly like the physical board game version. The facilitator starts a session on the app and invites participants to join. Team leaders take turns rolling the dice by pressing a button on-screen. The app automatically moves the token and pops up a question from the corresponding colour-coded stack. The discussion and point-scoring activity takes place outside of the game environment and in the video conferencing app.
The facilitator is the person who manages the entire training session. The app provides facilitators with their own control panel where they are given the option to either create a new session or view details for previous sessions that they moderated. When creating a new session, facilitators can choose to customise certain specifics – such as question sequence and participant details – before starting the game.
When a session is started, the app generates a unique link for it via which the facilitator invites the participants. Much like Zoom, the Equally Yours web app also has a waiting room feature. The game starts as soon as the facilitator changes the session status to allow participants in.
Throughout the session, the facilitator stays in control. The Equally Yours game board is available as a view-only screen to all participants. However, team leaders are allowed to roll the dice. Throughout the game, the facilitator can roll the dice on behalf of the team leaders. After each dice roll, the tokens move across the board automatically. The facilitator then draws a card depending on where the token lands. The question card is displayed, leading to a discussion, after which the facilitator awards points to each team.
To make the game view more appealing, interactive, and fun, we have added short GIFs to animate the rolling of the dice, movement of tokens, and flipping of question cards. The option to switch to high-contrast visuals makes the game more accessible.
The facilitator ends the session when they feel that the participants have engaged sufficiently and the key topics have been discussed. At the end of each session, the participants are asked to type in their feedback and the facilitator is allowed to take notes.
For maximum security, access to certain parts of the app is dependent on the users’ roles. Users can be assigned three roles:
For instance, if a user logs in as a facilitator, they are allowed to invite users, manage sessions, and even view reports. Participants are not granted these permissions. They merely get view-only access to sessions they are invited to. AKD administrators have a wider range of permissions: they are allowed to manage app users and AKD clients, as well as view reports on complete session history.
The app’s default language is English. However, facilitators have the option to choose from and conduct training courses in any of the other languages offered.
One major achievement for us is that we have successfully been able to provide real-time interaction to all users of the app during an active session. From moving tokens to updating team scores, everything is in perfect sync. To accomplish this, we implemented custom socket-based client-server communication at the backend.
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