Mission Mars: Developer Training Campaign
An interactive developer training campaign set on a colonised Mars — 59 workshops, nearly 1,000 hours of activity, some of the highest satisfaction scores in Microsoft history, and a special session at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
Microsoft · 2019 · 
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The brief
Microsoft needed to create hands-on developer training that would actually get developers excited to show up. Standard tutorial formats — static documentation, webinars, slide decks — weren’t cutting through. The ask was to create something inspiring, immersive, and genuinely fun, without sacrificing technical rigour.
What I did
We created Mission Mars: Fourth Horizon — an interactive training series built around an original narrative. The setting: a near future in which humans have colonised Mars. The mission: a last-ditch effort to reconnect stranded Martian astronauts with Earth, using Microsoft tools and technologies to solve a series of escalating technical crises.
Developers weren’t just running through exercises. They were enlisted into a mission. Each technical challenge was framed as a story beat, with real stakes and a reason to care about the outcome. The narrative gave the training momentum and made the Microsoft tools feel purposeful rather than arbitrary.
We ran the programme as a global series of workshops, bringing the experience to developer communities across 31 countries.
The results
- 5,000 developers trained across 31 countries
- 59 workshops totalling nearly 1,000 hours of training activity
- Among the highest satisfaction scores in Microsoft’s history for a training programme
- The team was invited by NASA to run a special session at the Johnson Space Center in Houston — a mark of the programme’s credibility with the scientific and developer community