Gamification: Month 1-2

This year marks my first endeavor into the imaginative world that is gamification. I had heard of gamification during my college career (I graduated in 2013), but I didn't have a great grasp on what it was exactly.

Last spring a colleague and I attended the Wisconsin Council for the Social Studies conference in Madison. At the conference we learned a great deal, but the session that stuck with me the most was Michael Matera's session about gamifying a class.

I was completely won over by the strategy before the session even ended, and my colleague was too. We both bought Matera's book, Explore Like a Pirate, and I began reading it right away. The beauty of the book is that it is well-organized, but it doesn't have to be read from front to back. I have spent a lot of time annotating, bookmarking with post-its, flipping back and forth, and revisiting sections of the book time and time again.

As soon as I attended the session, I knew that I wanted to gamify my classes this school year. With Explore Like a Pirate, I finally had the tools that I needed to do just that.

My only problem starting out was the scope of it all. Gamification is a vast, ever-changing world, and I started in the deep end. I dove in and planned out my entire year, focusing on the theme, items, badges, all of it. I simply didn't plan for how I was going to keep track of it all. There are resources out there, but with 5 different classes (not 5 class periods... 5 different classes) and with one of those classes being brand new to me, I feared that I wouldn't be able to stick with my theme throughout the entire year. By the time September arrived, I simply wasn't ready.

Instead of scrapping the whole idea (which would have left me heartbroken after all that work and dedication!), I decided to go with a suggestion offered by many of the experienced gamifiers. Use Classcraft!

Classcraft has entirely changed the way that I teach. As a firm believer in PBIS, I can assure you that Classcraft follows that philosophy quite closely. My students earn experience points for being positive, going above and beyond, helping each other, and trying new things. My students are asking for additional work to do for XP, when last year they would have done anything to get out of doing a homework assignment. My main concern, though, is making sure that the experience points (XP) do not replace homework points. The XP are for classroom behavior, and the homework points are for reaching the learning targets.

Last year I had a lot of issues with behavior management. This year, I barely have any issues and class participation has skyrocketed. I bought in, the students bought in, and it's working wonderfully!