Starting Slow: Not Overwhelming Yourself With New Classroom Concepts

As I said in my last post, Mr. Matera put forth a lot of great ideas to use in the classroom, each revolving around concepts used in modern video games and board games. There were incentives, strategies, projects, games, and ideas to enhance activities that we do all the time. I knew that if I jumped in both feet and tried to do it all, I would never get this ship off the ground. So I very intentionally looked at the four most basic things I could implement; badges, experience, a leaderboard, and items.

A Badge System
A few years ago I had heard of classroom badges. As someone who, for a short time, played a lot of Playstation games in search of gathering up all of the trophies in a game, I really relate to this topic. Students work to do objectives in the classroom that may or may not be specified. As a reward, they receive a small slip of paper with a picture on it that can be collected. If they gather a full set, they receive a bonus item. For use in the classroom.

This is an example of one of the pictures on the Training Badges that my students can earn. Finding art for these has been a lot of fun.

In my room, students can receive training badges and questing badges. Training badges are day to day activities like participation, teamwork, and maturity. Questing badges are for ungraded projects that students complete outside of class.

Experience Points and The Leaderboard
Badges and activities each have an assigned value. As the badges are earned students get the points associated. Earning 1000 points will boast their player level. This level will give them different perks and access to items and quests.

The leaderboard is to get those competitive juices flowing. The experience is tallied in a Google Spreadsheet. It took a bit to set up, but it was worth it. My first leaderboards will go up soon, so I will share more on that later.

Items
Matera expressed that when he started making items they seemed a bit shallow, just slips of paper that acted as homework passes and the ability to leave class a minute early (That matters so much to middle schoolers). Then when he turned the items in on the game, it really opened up what he could do. Items can affect the game in different ways. Students can get more XP, interfere with other teams during review games, and help out during boss battles (more on that later). They are also really fun to create. I will go into a lot more details as I give them out.

These are the four primary elements of my classrooms game. Starting slow is the key.