As I wrote in this previous post, I am helping our Environmental Science teachers design a gamification course. Over the past week, we have been busy developing the Syllabus, the Canvas courses, and organizing everything into Google Drive. I’ve also been brushing up on my spreadsheet formula skills.
Today, the students walked into their new 2nd semester classes to discover that they have been hired as recruits for the Mars Planning Corporation (MPC), (which is also a play on our school name having used the same initials). They will be traveling to and be part of a mission to Mars as the Earth is no longer a viable place to live due to the damage pollutants have caused to the environment. As part of their mission, they will be studying such things as atoms, geochemical processes including the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and water cycles; and will be investigating and understanding how water, living things, and rocks act together to shape landforms. Assignments will become “missions” and in order to move on, they will have to successfully complete each mission and get so many experience points. Missions have been designed to include different choices for students to complete and earn their points. They will also have the chance to earn achievement points for doing good things such as not having their phone out during class, bringing all their materials to class, and so on.
Before students travel to Mars, they will have to complete their first Mission: Astronaut Training. This mission is designed to be an introduction to not only the course but also the teacher and how our LMS, Canvas, will work for them during the semester. Their first assignment used Quizlet live as a sort of scavenger hunt to answer questions about the course and their teacher such as “what page in Canvas can you find information about…?” or “How many experience points does it take to reach the Captain badge level?” or “What are your teacher’s favorite hobbies?” and they could use the Syllabus, pages within Canvas, and their partners to find the answers. The great thing about Quizlet live is that it makes the students get up out of their seats to find their partners and form new groups and they have to work collaboratively as a team to answer.
The biggest difference for them will, of course, be their grades. I checked on our classes today and wanted to see how students were responding and some faces were a little shocked to hear that they were all starting with 0 points, but relaxed as they realized that even if they did bad on a project or mission test, their grade would never go down as any points earned would help them towards their final scores and grades.
The teachers also made it a little competitive as each class will also be competing against each other for overall scores and ranks. I helped created a leaderboard in Google Sheets that has separate workbooks for each teacher’s classes and then an overall one that shows only the student created avatar names, their score, and overall rank. Students will be able to view only the rank workbook. Here’s a sample of what we created. We then created a badge spreadsheet template that each student will be able to keep track of the badges they earn, thanks to this Alice Keeler tutorial.
I’m excited to see where this continues to go and start fleshing out more lessons turned missions with the teachers too. One of the upcoming units is on energy and I mentioned that students could take data from Google Sheets and import into Google My Maps like this example of the air quality in India I learned about at a Google Summit 2 years ago. Here’s the Google Sheets data and Google My Map example. They seemed very excited about this idea and I love sharing Google Map ideas for Science.
Ms Priester EDU 