Experience Points for Student Goal Setting

A couple of days ago, I posted about using forms and sheets for student reflections. As I was pushing it out to students, I started thinking about how to make it easy for me to assign XP and leveled badges for its use. Ideally, I would have some sort of automation that:

1. Allowed me to see students' latest goal without having to open each individual spreadsheet, and
2. Assigned XP and badges automatically.

Students latest goals:

I created a new spreadsheet, copy pasted my roster in column A, and used the importrange formula to bring the timestamp and goal from each individual grade reflection Goal sheet. For example:

=IMPORTRANGE("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/180ZOz9vkPq20ZDKy3KJUN--gVpWP6TABFKzk-hSxW5Q/edit#gid=168726689", "Goals!$A$3:$B$3")

Where:

•  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/180ZOz9vkPq20ZDKy3KJUN--gVpWP6TABFKzk-hSxW5Q/edit#gid=168726689" is the URL of the individual grade sheet
• Goals is the name of the sheet I am bringing over
• $A$3:$B$3 is the cell reference for time stamp and goal

Painstaking in that you do have to change each cell reference, but you only have to do this during set up. It is worth noting that when you do this the first time, you will probably get an error telling you that you need to grant permission. Just click on the cell and allow access. Also note that the sorting by timestamp was already done in their individual sheets as explained under Form Responses 2 in my previous post.

Automatically assign XP for goals

This portion of the post assumes that you are already using spreadsheets to house your leaderboard, and works with any version you may have created. If you are looking for one, I offer mine, Mr. Matera's or Mr. Powley's.

As we all know, the faster XP are show/given out, the better. This posed a problem for the assigning of XP for this activity since nothing would replace the student/teacher conferencing about their goals or the student actually reflecting on them. However, I figured that if I could at least give out points and badges for some measure of completion, I could always go back and make time for those conversations. As I toyed with how to do this, I thought about making sure that some specific words were included, but quickly gave up on that simply because my list of possibilities grew rather quickly. I settled instead for a simple word count and figured that 30 words at a minimum per goal are sufficient. Letting Google spreadsheets do the work for me, I added a hidden spreadsheet to the grade reflection spreadsheet template I shared before. When you make your own copy of that document, simply unhide it

As displayed when unhidden, this sheet is simply the place where the counting and calculation of XP happens and can be modified to suit your needs.

With that in place, it is back to the leaderboard page, where you would need to decide where you would like to maintain the information and when to assign badges. 

The formula used to bring the XP from the student grade reflection sheet to the corresponding cell in your leaderboard is:

=IMPORTRANGE("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/180ZOz9vkPq20ZDKy3KJUN--gVpWP6TABFKzk-hSxW5Q/edit#gid=168726689", "Wordcount!C2")

As before, each spreadsheet reference is unique to the student grade reflection sheet, so it needs to be manually changed and the spreadsheets need to be linked.

Finally, the awarding of badges is done using the techniques described in my Leaderboard and Badges post, using a conditional formula that awards badges according to the total points accumulated from the word count.

And the badges are displayed on the individual student sheets which feed from the leaderboard as explained in this post.

In an ideal world, the badges would only be assigned if the student actually met the goal they set for themselves, but that is a conundrum that I have yet to solve. Perhaps you have some ideas?

We don't need badges, or do we?

When I started my gamification journey, one of the sore spots, if you will, was the awarding of badges. On the one hand, I agree with the ideas in Daniel Pink's Drive and the overjustification effect, and which translates into "Badges ruining intrinsic motivation to learn". On the other hand, I have a gamer son, who keeps going back to specific games in his collection simply because he wants to get that elusive gold badge just so he can show it off in his profile. So which is it?

As I continued to ponder the answer to this question, I participated in a couple of workshops and PD that offered badges that could be "added to my profile". I was surprised by my own drive to complete the activities, not really for the sake of learning, but because I wanted to show off the badges I had. Badges were giving me a sense of accomplishment and encouraged me to persevere, even when I got bored! If badges were doing this for me, why was I being so reluctant to add them to my classroom?

I began exploring different ways that other educators have used badges and came up with two reasons that if addressed would make me re-think the whole badging issue.

First, if I were to include badges, I had to make sure that the badges represented real achievement. One of my concerns with badging is that it can simply become a sticker chart. The idea that everyone gets a badge simply for showing up or participating in an activity takes away the value of the badges. Let's face it if the students know that they will get a badge simply for filling in boxes in an assignment, will they put any effort into making sure that their answers are correct? Probably not. However, if they know that they will only get the badge if they get a high enough score, then they may feel that the badge has some value attached to it. Even better, let's say that they did not get a high score in the badge assignment(s) the first time around. Will knowing that they can re-work the assignment giving them more than one opportunity to earn the badge, motivate them to keep at it, even if they think it is boring or not worth their time? I think it will.

Now, if this is the case, then I knew that I needed to be able to make my own badges. There are several online tools that allow us to do that. Classbadges, Credly and OpenBadges come to mind. However, I prefer to fully create my own simply using GoogleDraw and clearly explained here by Alice Keeler.

Second, the whole idea of badges for me is that they must be public. Students will want to know, not only if they have the badge, but also who else in the classroom has it. That gamer sense of competition and being able to showcase achievement adds value to the badge. The tools mentioned before for creating the badges, also allow students to log in and view their badges. Now this would require students to create an account and/or log in with accounts that the teacher creates. That, for me, was a no go, and although I toyed with the idea of creating my own system using GoogleSheets, I decided against it (simply due to time constraints), when I came across Flippity.net's Badge Tracker. With a few tweaks, this tool allowed me to import the data of my existing leaderboard, use my own badges and embed it in my webpage for public viewing. All around win!

For now, I have decided on three types of badges:

Leveled Badges: These symbolize achievement in on-going assignments. Students will earn these badges by scoring well on their weekly writings and reading assignments.

Project Badges: These badges represent the skills and knowledge gained in a specific unit of study within the scope of science and engineering curriculum. 

Commitment Badges: These are badges awarded for achievement outside the leveled and project badges. What I envision here is, for example, a "Digital Citizenship" badge or a "Creative Commons" badge. 

So, what do you think about adding badges to your gamified classroom? I would love to hear your ideas.