Via: The Metaverse Journal - Virtual World Team Building
The Metaverse Journal has just interviewed TeamingStream’s CEO, Petri Ahokangas, about NoviCraft.
NoviCraft team building and leadership solution, is an immersive and engaging off-the-shelf multiplayer 3D application for trainers, HRD specialists and consultants for assessing, building, and developing leaders, teams and team work in modern organizations.
The game has been developed by LudoCraft in co-operation with a group of academic researchers on educational and leadership sciences. The publisher of NoviCraft is TeamingStream, a company providing NoviCraft-related training events with its consultancy partners.
The main idea of the game is to improve the participants’ awareness of their own behavior in teamwork situations. The more conscious you are of your own behavior and the interaction between you and your workmates, the easier it is to start developing those skills further.
TeamingStream™ NoviCraft creates a virtual team life-cycle consisting of five team scenarios, through which the participants are guided, each scenario with a specific purpose:
1) Giving and receiving help, building psychological safety for teamwork, establishing communication and goal orientation.
2) Planning and coordination of tasks and actions to achieve a goal.
3) Using creativity, experimenting and exploring as a team, sharing existing knowledge in joint problem solving.
4) Splitting the team into two sub-groups, both groups success needed to complete the task, innovation, risk taking.
5) Complete the task together within the shared frame of reference created during the game experience.
The participants’ individual and team game behavior and performance can be monitored enabling detailed analysis, evaluation, retrospective, and recommendations for further development.
The game can be played virtually everywhere: with all participants in one room or over the Internet connection enabling virtual and dispersed teams to experience real collaboration without unnecessary traveling.
TeamingStream was founded in April 2008 in Oulu, Finland.
They create visual, immersive and engaging 3D learning environments and content for team-building, leadership, management, and multicultural collaboration training.
Behind the company is a group of researchers in pedagogy, leadership and game development, as well as experts in human resource development work.
Despite the young age of the company, the history of its offering goes back to the year 2002, when the first generation of the game was developed for research purpose to find out whether computer games could be used for learning. After three product generations, and countless learning game sessions they have come up with a new learning product called NoviCraft™ in 2008.