Looney Labs Educators Mailing list Archive

[Edu] Will introduce Zendo to India to build troubleshooting skills‏

  • FromKai Price <kaiprice@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateFri, 7 Mar 2008 19:08:25 -0500
My company is sending me to Bangalore, India, for four weeks at the end of the month to teach my new coworkers at a support center opening there how to provide troubleshooting support for some complex storage software products. Although they are well-educated, in part because education is strongly encouraged in their society, all of their learning thus far has been by rote memorization.  This means that they are pretty much terrible at thinking outside the box, which is something that troubleshooting regularly requires.

I played a round of Zendo at this past Arisia science fiction convention, and I really enjoyed it. In fact, it occurs to me that it may help to communicate and build the requisite inductive reasoning skills necessary for troubleshooting. It may be a little optimistic and it would only be a tiny, informal part of the training I will be providing, but I am planning to bring Zendo to India and use it as a teaching tool. I was thinking actually, that I would put together a couple of large sets of pieces (since I will be addressing two different support teams in India), and then giving them away at the end, in hopes that they would continue playing after I have left.

I would be very interested in hearing about anyone else who has used Zendo in any similar sort of instructional manner.

Kai Price