In the Battle of Heroes vs Villains

Existing with and inside of a curriculum can be difficult. Especially for someone who wants to innovate and push the envelope constantly. This year, our district adopted a new curriculum for science: Amplify. I have had ups and downs with curriculum, especially scripted curriculum. I will say that Amplify has been pretty cool. Best of all though, is it lends itself very well to gamification. The two seem to compliment each other.

At the the end of each chapter, the students have to write a scientific explanation or argument to respond to the chapter’s main question. In a gamified classroom this would typically be a boss battle, in which students answer questions correctly to defeat the “boss” (the test). Tom and I tried that out, calling the parts of the rubric, the bosses hit points. It never felt quite right though. Writing does not lend itself well to the boss battle concept. After some discussion we decided that for our final paper of unit two, we would try something different.

Our game is based on Superheroes, but at the beginning of the year we allowed the students to decide if they were a hero or a villain. It was a decision we had not emphasized to this point. During this unit the students took on the role of conservation biologist in order to save Tokay geckos in the rainforest who were dying. Over the course of the unit students learned that street lights had been installed in the area were making it hard for the geckos to see because of their high sensitivity light receptors.

Tom and I choose to emphasize their affiliations of heroics of villainy in their final explanations in order to foster both competition and unity. For the heroes, they would write the explanation as they would have before, but they also had to add a solution to save the geckos and still protect the drivers. The villains on the other hand would write their normal explanation, but need to include a plot to use what they had learned to push the geckos in the area into extinction. Each paper would graded on the same rubric. Then we would take all the heroes scores and all the villains scores and average them out. To the winning side: 200XP on the leaderboard.

There was palpable excitement in the room as we broke this down for the students. We explained it and shared our expectations. We told them that if they wanted to share their papers with others on their team to get feedback, they could. This practice encourages teamwork and support. We also asked that their plot not be things like throwing all the geckos into a volcano, or getting rid of the highway altogether. They went to town, and it was crazy, y’all. There was real feedback and support as both weaker writers reached out to ones that they knew could offer constructive criticism.

After grading them, the students wrote some really great papers. Many students making their best efforts of the year. In the end, my favorite part was the plots to save or get rid of the geckos. We had heroes that suggested using lights that would dim or brighten based on motion sensors and building walls around the highway to limit stray light. We had villains that suggested installing additional street lights in between the existing streetlights and cutting down some of the trees near the highway to maximize the reach of the light being generated. Of all 74 students, whose papers that I read, only one did not base their plot around the information we learned about light and vision. Our final averages were heroes with 8.9 and villains with 8.4. The craziest part was that in three of our five classes the villains actually won. It came down to one weak performing villain group that did not work together, to give the heroes the victory. Talk about a teachable moment in cooperation.

There were some tiny things I will change when (not if) we do it again. Like setting the room up with heroes on one side and villains on the other. Making sure Tom and I used the exact same rubric, we had a small difference in point breakdown. We may allow sides to use a power up that pulls players to their side through “mind control” or “redemption”.

That said this was a huge success. Students were motivated, helpful and encouraging to one another. My favorite part of all of it though, was kids coming up with solutions that focused on the information they had worked so hard to learn. That is our goal, right? To have them apply what they learn to solve problems. This put the students in a position to really consider how we make problems better or worse. This took a fairly straight forward explanation one step further and made them apply their knowledge, which is the best display of learning I could ask for. It was amazing.