Gamified Update

We have done the gamified class for 3 weeks now, (I know it is the same posting date as the intro blog, but I was a little behind and am now catching up) and the students seem to be doing pretty well picking assignments to do and sticking with them. I may need to increase to point value of the quests as I thought that students would be collecting more points than they have. Accordingly so, a number of students are failing on the progress report, but that will change as I look to make adjustments to the values.

One cause of this point deficiency is that I will give my students a great task yet not realize just how difficult the task is to tackle. They are about 90% on task, but my assessment of how difficult a task is was incredibly off. To adjust for this, I have posted a number of quick and easy quests that students should take and quickly raise their grade.

A positive note has been the quest, "Hijack the Lesson." I teach a new concept on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and students are provided my schedule of concepts to lecture about on the website. At any time, a student could say they want to teach the lesson, and hijack it from me. I will give that student a 5 min crash course on the topic and then let him research the concept and develop a lesson. Sometimes they make a powerpoint, sometimes they make code for others to look at, and sometimes they just come to the board and start talking. We have 50 min periods, so I tell them that I will give them 100 pts minus 2 pts for each minute I have to explain after the fact.

After 3 tries, we finally had a student make it through the whole lesson. The first couple of times, students would start and after a couple of minutes would get nervous and give up. As the students develop a culture of trying to teach and patience, they are starting to take more risks and learn concepts on their own. I have also attached a class wide achievement called "Better than Barrett" hopefully to provide incentive for students to keep trying to "hijack" the lesson.

Well, that's all for today. More updates to come!