Take them to the dungeon!

When I first started reading the book about Gamification, it happened to coincide with me correcting one of my larger oversights as a Nintendo fan: I finally played the Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. One thing that I set out to do was create a dungeon. Not a "Take them to the dungeon!" prison style dungeon. In video games, like the Legend of Zelda, a dungeon is a place that you go to find new objects, solve puzzles, battle ugly monsters, and ultimately build up your character.

In Quest for the Shards of Light, my students would be visiting the Jungle Temple of Kip Cel Flahn. The name is ridiculous, but we are studying the Keep Change Flip strategy of dividing fractions, so K, C, and F had to be there. My original goal was to present this as a performance task, but in mapping out the unit, I had a two day opening. It was a perfect fit and it would be so much better than a standard practice in the form of worksheets. 

The dungeon activity started with a take on the collapsing floor trope of adventure films, like Indiana Jones. They had to solve division problems with fractions. If the quotient was greater than 5 then it was safe to step there. The groups had to work together to find the safest path to cross the room. 

For the second area, I knew that I wanted to include one branching path to give the students some choice. I went very basic with a hard room or a basic room. If they choose the basic room the work would be pretty standard and more what they were used to. If they choose the hard room however, I told them it would really push them. However the reward would be greater if they took that route. This area had two parts, a review of ordering fractions, decimals, and percents followed by three division problems with mixed numbers which they would solve and then put the answers in ascending order. The harder versions required the students to convert the fractions all the way to the third of fourth place in decimal form. 

The final area was six problems that would indicate which letters to use in a word. My original thought was to jumble the letters. However, this time, I decided to be a bit nicer since it was our first try. I choose the classic line from the Lord of the Rings, "Not all who wander are lost." The letters and answers would correspond to the word wander. This would turn around to bite me a bit, but I will get into that next time.

In preparing the activity, I did two rather enjoyable things. First, I added an element of story to the activity. As students went from one challenge to the next, there was a narrative to their journey. This was fun to write and really made me feel like this was something special. The other aspect I added was pictures like the ones above.  The pictures are intended to give this, and future dungeons, a flavor of their own. 

With the activity set, I made the copies and prepared for what I hoped would be something really great...but to hear about that you will have to wait until next time.