I got the chance to go into Mike Franz’s high school gov & econ class when they were playing YOLO, a year-long game where one week of school represents one year of life. The first week of the game the students are 18 years old, the last week of the game they are near retirement…
Players seek risks, challenges, rewards, and recognition when they play a game. Application of various game mechanics to learning experiences can help fulfill these ‘human motivations’. When you design a learning game, you need to choose mechanics that seem appealing for your students, whilst also ensuring that they gel well with the context and the…
Rezzly is a gamification platform for the classroom. Students interact with Rezzly through the completion of quests. There are currently 20,000 quests available from other teachers, and you can create your own. The platform takes care of all the nitty gritty data collection for you. The onboarding for students has a pretty steep usage curve,…
The Minotaur King has a grip on the hero, Master Heebs, who refuses to divulge where he has hidden a rare and precious gem. Tasked with liberating their master and reclaiming their resource-rich land are 22 eighth graders armed with tablets and a mini whiteboard. They will defeat the Minotaur King with a series of…
In the past, I’ve written on ideas for gamification—using games in the classroom—but lately I’ve been reflecting on some of the bigger ideas that games open up in terms of pedagogy and the classroom experience. While we can use games as tools and perhaps build units that are gamified, we might also adopt some basic…
For the last nine weeks of the school year I decided to check out Classcraft.com as I look into gamification in the classroom. This won’t be a review, but more of a first look at Classcraft and how it can work in the classroom. What is gamification? Gamification is the use of behavioristic tools in the…
I’ve been playing around with gamifying my classroom this semester. After looking at Classcraft I decided I wanted something a little simpler, so I put together a Google Sheet to keep track of XP, AP, and HP. The problem came when I needed to add or subtract a stat from a student. Entering the data…