Antonis Triantafyllakis with Experiential Learning and Gamification

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Antonis is a soft skills trainer, facilitator and consultant, combining experiential learning with gamification to ensure a holistic, playful and impactful approach to capacity building, adaptable to the learners’ needs.

Antonis would describe his life as constantly in transition, each day been very different for him. Each day depends massively on the project he is working on and the location of that project, most of the days consist of his duties for that specific project.

Antonis’ favorite fail comes from a time when he was transitioning into a permanent residency in Berlin as well as transitioning from volunteer work to working in the private sector. At one point after this, he tried to focus his work on HR managers for his training offering. What he discovered in practice was that this didn’t work out as, at least in Berlin, they don’t have the decision-making power. From here Antonis recognized his fail and started to focus on different target groups and started getting more success. If Antonis was to approach this again he would advise to analyze the target group and focus on the right one that’s going to help you achieve what you want to.

Antonis’ favorite story of success is his story of developing good habits, he managed to get himself on the diet he wanted to be eating, had a regular workout schedule, drinks enough water per day, etc. the way he does this is by gamifying the experience. He gains points with each task he completes that he has set himself and this managed to give him the motivation to stay consistent for himself. He would strongly recommend gamifying your life. The app he used is Loresome.

When Antonis is approaching his process, he starts by clarifying the goals he wants to achieve, writing down very clearly and specifically what at the end of the process the participants will have gained. From here he then reverse engineers this to see what the necessary steps are to take to get to that endpoint. He then breaks it down into the four stages of a game and looks at each stage what he wants the participant to have achieved, he applies this for everything from a 1-hour workshop to a 1-week course.

When developing a game of game-based experience Antonis’ would recommend considering the impact of what it is you’re creating, the social impact of it and how your audience becoming better after this.

He would recommend Ken Robinson to be on the podcast, who had a really popular Ted Talk in which he discussed the subject Do Schools Kill Creativity? and he would love to listen to his opinion on gamification now it is becoming more and more popular. Antonis would recommend the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn a philosophical book from the ’90s, the reason Antonis enjoys this book although it is not directly related to gamification is that it helps people break down their assumptions and social biases they may have. He recommends this because gamification requires a lot of out of the box thinking and this is a great book for that.

Antonis has many favorite games, however, he would like to recommend the board game Dixit because of how simple it is and the fact that each time you play with a different group of people the game you play is entirely different and therefore has unlimited playability. The cards that are used also have nice artwork and therefore it can be appealing to people who have never played it.

His superpower is experiential learning due to his experience coming from the non-profit sector as a trainer and then combining this with gamification and his love for games.

He had the chance to answer one of the random questions, listen in to find out more!

His final piece of advice would be that gamification is about motivation and the way you play games is by playing them, so let people discover the game by experience.

We can find Antonis on his web mytrainer.cc and on LinkedIn.

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob