About GCP DECODE
The story behind YouTube's most trusted Google Cloud Arcade study channel, our mission to support global learners, and why we built this calculator tool.
Our Mission: Simplifying Cloud Education
Completing hands-on cloud labs can be highly frustrating. Google Cloud Platform is incredibly powerful, but it requires precise configurations. A single missing character in a shell script, an unconfigured service account role, or an out-of-order network routing rule can cause your automated grade checks to fail, wasting hours of effort and precious learning credits.
GCP DECODE was founded with a simple, unified mission: to demystify Google Cloud technology for students, developers, and cloud architects worldwide.
We make learning highly transparent. On our official YouTube channel, we publish free, detailed, step-by-step video walkthrough guides for the active gameplay tracks (Trail, Voyage, Adventure) and challenging skill badges. We show you exactly how to write your commands, configure GCP consoles, and bypass common script bugs so that you can complete your curriculum successfully on your first attempt.
Why We Built This Points Calculator
As the Google Cloud Arcade program grew in popularity, we noticed that students faced a major challenge: tracking their accumulated points. Because Google’s learning portal doesn’t show a live point balance, students had to manually count their skill badges and games, leading to confusion and errors when planning for the Prize Counter.
To solve this, our team built this Arcade Points Calculator. By pasting your public profile URL, our script scans your validated achievements and instantly calculates your active point balance in real-time. This ensures that you always know exactly where you stand, what milestones you have unlocked, and how many points you need for your target swag rewards.
Connect with Our Visual Walkthrough Channel
Join a thriving global community of over 15,000+ active student learners! Click the direct link below to subscribe to the channel, check active gameplay tracks, and connect with fellow study groups:
GCP DECODE
Your go-to source for weekly lab walks, console deployment cheatsheets, and live study sessions.
Visit GCP DECODETypes of Content We Produce
Our channel covers four distinct content categories, each designed to serve a specific learning need in the Arcade community:
🎬 Challenge Lab Walkthroughs
Full-length screen recordings showing exact console configurations, terminal commands, and resource deployments needed to achieve 100% check scores on the most difficult skill badge challenge labs.
📋 Monthly Game Track Guides
Published within 24-48 hours of each new monthly game release, these videos cover every lab in the Trail, Voyage, and Adventure tracks with step-by-step instructions.
📝 Command Reference Sheets
Pre-formatted gcloud CLI command templates, bash scripts, and Terraform snippets that students can copy directly into their Cloud Shell terminals during active labs.
🔄 Program Updates & Rule Changes
Analysis videos covering Arcade rule changes, point structure updates, new badge releases, and upcoming program deadlines. We break down official announcements into plain-language summaries.
Community Milestones & Impact
Since its founding, our channel has grown into a significant educational community with measurable impact on student learning outcomes:
- Active subscriber community: Over 15,000 subscribers, with daily engagement from learners in India, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
- Video coverage: More than 400 individual lab walkthrough videos published, covering challenge labs across networking, AI/ML, security, DevOps, and data analytics domains.
- Response time: New game track walkthroughs are published within 24-48 hours of each monthly release, ensuring students can complete time-gated tracks before their earning windows close.
- Tool development: This ArcadePoints Calculator was developed directly in response to repeated community requests for a reliable, automated point tracking system.
Our Commitment to Transparency
This tool and our study channel are 100% community-funded and educational. We have no commercial affiliations with Google LLC, and our platform is designed solely to support students in building practical GCP cloud engineering careers. All content is independently produced and reflects our own analysis and interpretations of publicly available program information.
Google Cloud, Cloud Skills Boost, Qwiklabs, and all related trademarks belong to their respective owners. Our use of these names is strictly for educational identification and does not imply any endorsement or partnership.