Let’s Go Gaming!

Before the holiday break, one of our Science teachers asked me what I knew about Gamification in the classroom as she was thinking about adapting her entire Environmental Science unit for next semester.

Honestly, I didn’t know much. It’s a topic that I’m interested in, but have never had the chance to delve deep into until now. I started doing some research into how we would get started as we waited for approval from admin. Here’s a look at my notes:

To quickly summarize, there’s 3 different types of gamification:

Quests are missions or short adventures with objectives and achievable goals. Mastery badges reward students with a badge once they have mastered a skill set. Experience points is where students would accumulate points as they progress through activities.

These articles offered me some insight that helped as we began discussions on our first steps:

• Gameful lessons focus on the learning, not the product
• Gamification in the Classroom: The Right Way or Wrong Way to Motivate Students?
• Epic Fail or Win? Gamifying Learning in My Classroom
• Chart students’ growth with digital badges

Both of us agreed that Experience Points seemed to be the best option based on the curriculum and the LMS we use, Canvas. I also like this option because students never lose points, and generally, have more focus on achieving points and worrying less about whether they got a passing grade or not.

After our first chat, the biggest concerns about the project was how parents may react to this very innovative idea and how we could manipulate the grade book to use Experience Points. This became my next point of research. Here are the three sites I found that gave good examples of what we were looking for:

• Gamified Gradebook in Canvas
• Gamified Gradebook in Excel
• Gamify Your Class Level I: Xp Grading System

While we figured out the gradebook scenario, approval from admin was given and the entire Environmental Science team signed on to try this new style of teaching. Altogether we will have 7 classes and 4 teachers involved. We also plan to have some “missions” or challenges where classes run up against each other.

I’m excited to see how this continues to shape up and how the students will feel come second semester. Next week, I’ll share a little more about the background story we’re coming up with and how it will shape our “missions”.