This New Training Game Is *Chef's Kiss*

We recently launched Noodle, a word-guessing puzzle game in The Training Arcade®. Noodle is perfect for leveraging the power of microlearning through a fun and familiar game mechanic.

In this webinar with Ellen Burns-Johnson, Lead Game Designer at ELB Learning, attendees learned how to build a Noodle game. Ellen also covered when you might want to use this new game style in your training content.

What Is the Noodle Game?

Noodle is a word-guessing puzzle game. The name is a play on the phrase “it’ll bake your noodle,” meaning “it’ll really make you think.”

How It Works:

A puzzle is a mystery word that is 3 to 7 letters long. There is a maximum of 10 puzzles per session.
The mystery word is represented by a row of squares on the screen—one empty square for each letter.
Players guess the word by entering letters, submitting their guess, and interpreting the game’s letter-by-letter feedback on the guess.
Players have a limited number of attempts to guess the word and solve the puzzle.

Instructional Applications for the Noodle Word Puzzle Game

From a knowledge check to knowledge reinforcement, Noodle fits well into your existing training strategy. It’s a great way to generate interest before a training event and to remind your workers what they learned after a session.

Build Curiosity

Puzzles create a meaningful, more intriguing challenge than a simple text-based quiz or knowledge check. They’re also great for pre-training activities to get your learners interested in a topic.

Increase Engagement

You can mix in more interactivity with games, creating a nice break from text-based content and documents.

Reinforce Learning

The replayability and repetitive nature of games lead to stronger recall.

Have More Touchpoints

Mixing games between sessions and training days gives your learners more opportunities to interact with your training content.

Common Design Questions When Building Noodle

Question: From an Instructional Design perspective, how should I think about a category versus a prompt?

Answer: A category refers to a domain of knowledge. Suppose you’re creating learning about cybersecurity. Some categories within that might be hacking methods, avenues of risk, information hygiene, etc.

A prompt is a question or phrase that relates to the solution word.

In the webinar, Ellen showed a great example of using an AI chatbot to quickly write puzzles for a Noodle game, which helps answer the following questions.

Question: What if my word is longer than seven letters?
Question: Do all prompts need to be formatted the same way?
Question: What about numbers?

Answer: AI can help you come up with questions, suggest different words if your chosen words are too long to fit in a Noodle game, and more.

Ellen’s suggested prompt for AI is:

I’m working on a word puzzle game about __________.

Can you summarize the following source content into five words, each of which is between 3 and 7 letters? For each word, explain how the word relates to the concepts from the source content below.

Here’s the source content: [paste your source content]

Watch the webinar recording to see a Noodle game in action and learn more about the behind-the-scenes analytics every Training Arcade game delivers.

Not familiar with The Training Arcade®? Get a free trial here.

The Training Arcade features 11 pre-built game templates (including JEOPARDY!® and Wheel of Fortune®). Add your own content, and build a game in minutes (no coding required). Publish the game with a URL, embed it into an eLearning course, or download it as a SCORM package for your LMS.

Other features include: