In a previous post Learning a new skill, I reflected on my learning process and concluded there are two important aspects - setting a concrete goal and making sure you stay motivated enough to achieve it. In order to satisfy both aspects, it helps to know the steps in order to achieve the goal. This will give you a good idea of the effort involved and to set expectations. Trying to distil acquiring a skill into a set of steps is not uncommon to those familiar with skill trees in games. In this post, I try to formalise the progression in snowboarding, visualising it as a skill tree.
Skill Trees
I will give a quick TLDR here, but there is already a great article, Skill Tree Principle - An Innovative way to grow your skills efficiently, which goes into detail explaining skill trees and applying them to real life skills.
A skill tree is used as a form of progression in games. It is a visual representation of every ability you could have and how to get it. Abilities are made to be desirable for the person playing the game, however they need to be unlocked in order to use. The most desirable abilities require unlocking other abilities as a prerequisite. Unlocking a skill requires a skill point, which the game rewards players with over time.
When applying a skill tree to real life “progression”, abilities are skills, like being able to do a backflip. To unlock the backflip skill you will first need the skills: jump, core strength, ariel awareness, (fearlessness), etc… The real life parallel to a skill point would be time spent practising.
Snowboarding Skill Tree
Goals
Shows what is possible Clear path to acquiring a particular skill Steps should be atomic. There shouldn’t be significant jumps between steps. Highlights common prerequisite skills (hot skills) Defines clear branches / specialisations Current progression at a glance
Minimum skill tree
At its most basic, learning to snowboard requires a person to first acquire a fundamental skill and then they are free to continue building on core skills (Advanced) or spec into three different environments. This initial tree does a good job emphasising the importance of learning the fundamentals and overall structure, but is a fairly uninspiring progression.
| Goal | Achieved? |
|---|---|
| Shows what is possible | ❌* |
| Clear path to acquiring a particular skill | ❌* |
| Steps should be atomic. There shouldn’t be significant jumps between steps. | ❌ |
| Highlights common prerequisite skills (hot skills) | ✔️ |
| Defines clear branches / specialisations | ✔️ |
| Current progression at a glance | ❌ |
*Skill names are too vague.
Better skill labelling
Labeling the steps can help make the tree more interesting. Even if you don’t understand the term “Linked turns”, the implication is you will once you complete the step.
When designing a skill tree for a game, a general principle is to make the initial steps simple to understand and increase the complexity as they get used to the mechanics. The key difference is completing a skill tree step in a game unlocks new mechanics / abilities, whereas in the real world completing a step happens after we have learnt the ability.
Linking your turns requires several hours of lessons, so as a first step it would be good to split it up to allow for a faster feedback loop. As snowboarding requires… well snow (and a slope), it might be helpful to include the location in the skill tree.
| Goal | Achieved? |
|---|---|
| Shows what is possible | ✔️* |
| Clear path to acquiring a particular skill | ❌* |
| Steps should be atomic. There shouldn’t be significant jumps between steps. | ❌ |
| Highlights common prerequisite skills (hot skills) | ✔️ |
| Defines clear branches / specialisations | ✔️ |
| Current progression at a glance | ❌ |
*The skill tree is too simple
Adding more detail
Fleshing out the tree your immediate next steps are now actionable - find a place to learn. You can see that choosing either a mountain or indoor slope will result in learning linked turns, but only the mountain path provides access to the piste and off-piste environments. You can also see that linking turns requires two types of skills. It might be clearer where the name comes from now.
The tree now includes intermediate steps like Mountain, Training slope and Mountain savvy. These aren’t really skills, but help make reading the progression a bit more intuitive. They are also, in a sense, an achievement as they require a fair bit of effort getting there. We are now straying from a purely skill-based tree, however it might not be a bad thing.
| Goal | Achieved? |
|---|---|
| Shows what is possible | ✔️* |
| Clear path to acquiring a particular skill | ✔️ |
| Steps should be atomic. There shouldn’t be significant jumps between steps. | ✔️* |
| Highlights common prerequisite skills (hot skills) | ✔️ |
| Defines clear branches / specialisations | ✔️ |
| Current progression at a glance | ❌ |
*Much more to snowboarding!
Adding even more detail!
There is still a lot more I can add, especially the tricks. More advanced tricks will require several smaller techniques, which will end up making the tree a web of edges and very hard to read. It may be impossible to create a skill tree that satisfies everything we want. At some point there is a trade off between readability and verboseness.
| Goal | Achieved? |
|---|---|
| Shows what is possible | ✔️* |
| Clear path to acquiring a particular skill | ✔️ |
| Steps should be atomic. There shouldn’t be significant jumps between steps. | ✔️** |
| Highlights common prerequisite skills (hot skills) | ✔️ |
| Defines clear branches / specialisations | ✔️ |
| Current progression at a glance | ❌ |
*Much more to snowboarding! **Requires balancing with readability
Including progress
In terms of my own development the tree shows at a glance how far I have come and some immediate next goals to set. It also helps to illustrate how diverse the subject is. If it was possible to create a standard skill tree, it may also be useful for comparing two people’s abilities.
| Goal | Achieved? |
|---|---|
| Shows what is possible | ✔️* |
| Clear path to acquiring a particular skill | ✔️ |
| Steps should be atomic. There shouldn’t be significant jumps between steps. | ✔️** |
| Highlights common prerequisite skills (hot skills) | ✔️ |
| Defines clear branches / specialisations | ✔️ |
| Current progression at a glance | ✔️ |
*Much more to snowboarding! **Requires balancing with readability
Conclusion
Designing a skill tree in this way leans more towards understanding and documenting a skill or topic. It is great for visualising long-term progression and choosing sensible goals. However, there are quite a lot of caveats. Without a tool, creating and organising a skill tree of this size takes a lot of time. There are a couple of tools available, the ones dedicated to skill trees do not currently support the level of complexity shown here. Generic graphing tools like D3 would however be able to handle visualising the tree as a force directed graph. You can also leverage 3D visualisations for the extra degree of freedom.
Contrary to in-game skills, in the real world skills are more interconnected. For the sake of readability, some connections may need to be left out. Skill Tree Principle - An Innovative way to grow your skills efficiently gets around this by keeping the skill trees smaller and more focused.
All in all, I like the result and found the process itself helpful (Give it a go yourself if you have the time!). I would like to see further steps added, maybe trying out some force directed graphs. There are plenty of descriptions of snowboarding competencies, it would be interesting to see if they can be mapped to the skill tree.