SketchUp Gamifies Design Learning with “Adventure Mode”

Learning design is hard. Even with the simplest of tools, like SketchUp, it can be difficult to get your brain to associate those little icons with real world actions. The folks at SketchUp know this, and they’re taking great measures to help ease the process.

What better way to teach basics than to turn it into a game? Gamification has been proven to not only be an effective tool for slowly introducing new systems and interfaces, but also for supplying the incentive for which to continue learning. You wanna beat the next boss right? You gotta keep playing!

With gamification in mind, SketchUp is releasing “adventure mode,” a game within SketchUp, designed to teach you the interface. You use SketchUp’s normal features, such as extruding surfaces, in order to play the game. Along the way you slowly broaden your toolset to continue. You can read more about it on their blog.

We realize that there is an extremely high chance that this is just an April Fools’ gag, but really, aren’t a lot of true things said in jest? We think it could be fun.