My gamification experiment is over, and the results are in!
The most common questions I received from my students were…
“Can we do this again?”
And…
“You mean you’re going to do this all year next year?! Why couldn’t we do it all year?!”
I’d say they liked it 🙂
Most of my students earned enough Experience Points, or XP as my students say I should call them, to use either a 50/50 badge or a High 5 badge with a Candy Crush badge.
One student was a mere 5 points away from using a Post-It Pal, and was highly disappointed!
The vast majority of my students at least earned the opportunity for a High 5, and were quite adamant to keep their badges. I was very surprised by this..I suppose I thought the pride of badges, stickers, and the like had worn off by this age. I am very glad to declare that I was wrong! It’s so great to see students take pride in something that they earned, even if it is a colorful piece of cardstock 🙂
Lesson learned!
As I told my students, I definitely plan to continue gamifying my classroom next year and will make this “mission” a yearlong event.
I’m already planning levels and secret quests and more!
I’m really geeking out with the gamified classroom concept…especially for a non-gamer 🙂
Thanks for reading!
Where can we go to see what you’ve done and how it was set up? What programs did you use? How did you explain it to your students? Did they come up with ideas or suggestions too? I’m so excited to see what you did. I’m not a gamer either so I’ve no clue on how this could be done, but I’m curious to see how all of this worked for you.
I am very interested in learning how you did your gamification for your class. I just recently got hired to teach 7th and 8th grade History (after teaching 5th grade for 7 years) and something like you have done really interests me. I have done various simulations in my 5th grade class, but nothing like what you have done . Any tips, ideas, or information you can share would be appreciated. Thanks.