The need for fun
The Red Panda are a favourite exhibit at many Zoos because of their cute and friendly natures. We love to watch them romp and play, knowing this is how they act in the wild to learn more about each other in their social groups. They learn how much they can jump, how strong they are, how quick their friends are and how they can work together in a hunting or defense action, i.e. their work.
We know from developmental studies on us humans that play has a great positive impact on learning. We know that social cohesion creates better productivity and creativity from teams.
Work takes a quarter of our lives.
We enter jobs that we think will suit us and work within a group of people for whole days.
What more proof do we need that a bit of fun in the workplace is not only beneficial, but necessary for profitability. We need to play within reasonable bounds, but there is a lot of scope for encouraging cheerful, respectful and socially inclusive activity into our daily culture. With this we can learn much more about ourselves and our colleagues and what the bounds of our team and our systems really are.
This also extends to our relationship with clients and the ability to make their lives a little more cheerful through a better designed product. Adding features that may seem uneccessary, but make their lives so much better and ensure they favour our product over our competitors'.
Example
Quick little games can be used as proof of concepts of what is possible. This little example is a very quick Javascript, but it does show the ability to rapidly apply the concepts necessary to display the use of coding in a fun way.
Please note that this was an exercise during class, but the group didn't get a chance to push data t the repository and I stayed back after class to finish. As it stands, the entirety of this branch is done by myself.