Side quests - with semi automated XP

If you are new to the idea of side quests, consider visiting Explore Like a Pirate and GamificationEDU.

The past few weeks I have been mulling over the idea of adding more sidequests to my game. Up until now, sidequests have been few and far between for a couple of reasons. The biggest hurdle is that I have felt that it is up to me to develop the side quest, complete with resources for the students, and this simply takes too much time. Another issue is that I honestly have never put in a system for awarding XP for sidequests, so whenever a student has actually completed one that I planned for we are both dissatisfied with the XP assigned. If this was not enough, I hate the idea of prepping all of this only to have one student actually complete the side quest that may have taken me days to craft. Yes, it is a me problem.

However, my gamification #PLN often mentions sidequests as a great way to engage students, and provide in-class time for struggling or less interested students to catch up, while more advanced students happily toil on the sidequests. This got me thinking about how I could shift more of the responsibility of side quests to students by providing a board of activities with some assigned XP for attempting/submitting, but still have the choice to add either XP or items on top of that if the end product warrants it. With that in mind, I turned to Westphal's "Differentiating Instruction with Menus", and the internet, and came up with a menu of 15 ideas that could be used as a sidequest. The menu includes a general side quest rubric and explains that the base XP value of a side quest type decreases the more times it is attempted. My motivation for placing this limitation is simply that I would rather a student attempt different avenues to explore the content and not fall into a routine of recreating the same thing for different concepts. The menu also includes a space for complete student choice for my more adventurous students.

With that hurdle taken care of, the issue of how to collect the work, keep track of who did what, avoid repeats and assign XP needed to be taken care of. I toyed with the idea of writing a Google Sheets script, but that is, at the moment, beyond me. What I came up with is a Google Form whose response sheet would:

1. Provide a place to submit the work (if the work is a physical product, the students will have to take a picture and submit that. I wanted to avoid the "I created a mobile and left it in your room, but there is no XP!"
2. Ensure that duplicates of a file are not counted for assigning base XP. (I have middle schoolers who are prone to clicking submit over and over in hopes of rigging the system)
3. Automatically count the number of times a specific side quest type has been submitted and assign base XP accordingly.
4. Automatically add up the XP a student receives.

This is the sheet/form I came up with, and you are welcome to make a copy of both. The folder and its contents are shared with anyone can view. To make a copy, click on file/make a copy for each of them, placing them in the same folder. Depending on your district's permissions you may be able to make a copy of the response sheet and have the option to create the form, or you may need to copy both and link them yourself.  For those of you that may need to recreate the form from scratch, I have included comments on each sheet explaining what it does and the formulas that are attached. Brief recap of how this works:

• FormResponses1: Is where the data from the form is collected, and the query to check for unique URLs is created.
• Unique: Counts the number of unique URLs and type of product by student e-mail.
• PivotCount: Creates a pivot table that adds the values for each product type.
• BasePoints: Uses the data from the pivot table to assign base XP values.
• BaseXP: Creates a pivot table that adds the base XP earned by each student e-mail

I am sure that there is a more elegant way of doing all of this, and I welcome any feedback or suggestions.  If you would like to know how to automatically add these scores to your leaderboard or grade book, I invite you to take a look at "Assign XP automatically using Vlookup - Google Sheets".

Beyond the Leaderboard: Self-ranking charts

A couple of days ago, I talked about creating a multiple-class, self-ranking leaderboard. My students love the idea of being able to see where they rank, and compare themselves to one another, creating this competitive gaming environment that often leads them to perform and to keep working, simply to "outrank" one another. As I was updating my class website to include this new board, I started thinking about how to use the leaderboard as more than just a ranking system for the XP. Could I use it to inform students about how they are doing in different categories? Could I show the data in some way that would maintain the integrity of the leaderboard, but focus students' attention on opportunities for improvement as well? And almost as important, is there an easy way to do it; one that would not require much more than inputting values as the students grow? The answer turned out to be YES on all accounts.

Before I show you how, let me share the end products:

"I Need To Do More" chart

This first interactive chart, displays the totals for each XP category. As the year progresses, students can see how much each of the categories has impacted their XP totals. On their own, or with some help, they can decide to go back to assignments they may have missed or where they scored low XP and re-do/re-submit in order to up their total XP for that category. In my case, it could show an Aha moment akin to, "I have not done many of my blogs, if I do them now I can gain all those XP I missed".

"I Need To Do Better" chart

In this other format, the same data is displayed by average XP obtained in each category. When students see the data organized this way, they can quickly see areas where they can focus their efforts, to increase their standings.

The beauty of both of these charts is that they use the same Pivot Table I created for the self-ranking leaderboard, so not only do they update as soon as I input new values, they are also tied to the original ranking. The student order within the chart updates as well as they move up or down on the leaderboard, making it a "one-stop" responsive system that does not create more work for me to maintain or update.

The following video explains how to create the charts, and I am also sharing a template that you can use to draft your own.

Let the games begin!

Appsmash to Gamify - From Leaderboards to Quests

Although many of us agree that gamifying your classroom can provide benefits in terms of engagement and relevance for the students. Many of the teachers I have talked to have this idea that gamification is too hard, or that you can only do it by purchasing an app or some other tool, which may or may not limit what you can do. However, this is simply not true. With the myriad of free tools at our disposal and a little creativity, you can create your own gamified world for little to no money. Gamification is about creating a game-like experience, not about creating an actual game.

Before we go any further, take a peek at my "Island of AdVENTURE", where our ultimate goal is to take over the world. That is the simple storyline for my classroom. The benefit of such a broad and vague topic is that it will never be "done", and gaming elements can easily be added as they are needed. I talked about the decision to adopt a single storyline for all my classes in a previous post. If interested, you can visit Gamification Year 2 - The quest continues.

So, what was needed to create the Islands of AdVENTURE experience?

Game Website:  

If you have been here before, you know that my go to place for this is WIX, because it allows for ultimate flexibility in item placing, allowing you to embed practically anything you may wish to add. WIX is free to use, and gives you one place to create as many web sites and subpages within a site  as you need. On the game website itself, I like to add links to my blog, class calendar, and all of our classroom policies, procedures and even the green sheet. This gives the students a central place to go for everything related to the gamified classroom, and completely eliminates any "but I didn't know..." moments. These different documents are added as tabs, or in the case of the classroom management stuff, an interactive Thinglink image that gives access to all documents with a simple click.

Maps: 

This is the only item in my gamification arsenal that I paid for: Profantasy Campaign Cartographer. I could have used art from other sources and/or even used maps from Google Mapmaker, but creating my own allowed me utmost flexibility to include what I wanted, down to shaping the islands to represent grade levels, and creating distinct homes for each class.

This was also where I began to Appsmash. The islands on the game website are linked to the grade level houses and leaderboard using "invisible" shapes that act as buttons. The quests inside the houses are linked using interactive Thinglink images. The reasoning for this is simple. I wanted the students to be able to quickly and easily identify the quests they have, without cluttering the images with a lot of text or buttons. By hovering over each icon, students can quickly access the quests they are undertaking without any instructions from me regarding the icon that was used to represent a specific assignment.

XP and Leaderboards:

In my class, students gain experience points (XP) by blogging consistently and by completing the different projects they work on. Whatever you choose for XP, I recommend that you do not tie it to behavior, but rather mastery of skills or concepts. Just like in games and real life, XP does not "go down". Once you gain experience, you never get experience taken away. 

To create the leaderboard(s), I use Google sheets. I previously shared how to create one for a single class. This year, I am adding a leaderboard that functions much the same way, but since I am working with a single storyline, I needed to create one that could rank all my students from different classes and give us a way to compare classes. The following video will show you how.

Quests:

In my project based learning (PBL) environment we have two types of quests. The PBL Quests that culminate in a Boss Battle (i.e. the project product itself) and Mastery Quests. The PBL Quests are created using WIX for the bigger projects or Tackk for smaller assignments. Both allow embedding and manipulation of the color schemes, backgrounds, etc. giving you the opportunity to create a different aesthetic feel for each quest. The PBL Quests are embedded into the class game site and linked through Thinglink.

The Mastery Quests are the worksheets (level 1), quizzes (level 2) and tests (level 3) I use with students.  This simple renaming and leveling of the different types of work, tells the students how they need to prepare, and gets them excited about completing them. Don't you agree that it is much cooler to complete a Mastery Quest Level 3 than to take a test?

To create the first two types of Mastery Quests, I use the capabilities of Wizer.me. Mastery Quests Level 1 usually have links, videos and/or simulations embedded (example) and Level 2 may still have some supports (example). For Level 3, you can still use Wizer.me if you wish to give access to articles or graphs that the students must analyze. For a more "traditional" level 3 Mastery Quest, however, I use Google forms.

I usually do not embed the Mastery Quests in the game website itself, but rather give access to them by posting the individual URLs for the different assignments on our Edmodo stream. Of course, they can be shared in Google classroom or whatever other way you currently have to distribute online work.

Class Currency:

The behavior rewards, if you would like to have them, can be handled in several ways. In the interest of Appsmashing, you could use Class Dojo, and have it embedded into your WIX page. However, that has never really worked for me. I find it cumbersome to walk around with a device and scrolling when I want to assign behavior points. For this I go old-school, and use my school's paper based currency (Patriot Bucks), giving them out as needed. Since they are physical objects, I do not have to create a way to manage them. The "store" is created again using a Thinglink  embedded into the WIX class game page so that students can simply hover over the different items, and check "prices". 

What do you think? Have you tried gamification in your class? Please share your experiences.

Leaderboards with Google Apps, an update

A while back I talked about using Google Spreadsheets to create a leader board. The main drawback I saw in my original version is that students (and me) were unable to see clearly who was in the lead unless I sorted it, which at times created errors in some of the cells. I continued to tinker with it and discovered the pivot table function. This was the answer!

 Here is a video tutorial that shows just how to create the self-ranking leader board.

The formulas that I used to create this are -

Importing ranges of cells:

=arrayformula(index(Leaderboard!A1:A38))

Conditional formula for images:

=IF(C2>=15401, image("https://goo.gl/3Pqxfr"),IF (AND(C2<=15400,C2>=13601), image("https://goo.gl/thtuwd"), IF (AND(C2<=13600,C2>=11901), image("https://goo.gl/2yWS3J"),IF(AND(C2<=11900,C2>=10301),image("https://goo.gl/I76A2i"),IF(AND(C2<=10300,C2>=8801),image("https://goo.gl/ahUpyM"),IF(AND(C2<=8800,C2>=7501),image("https://goo.gl/XyVodq"),IF(AND(C2<=7500, C2>=6301),image("https://goo.gl/ORNbNs"),IF(AND(C2<=6300, C2>=5201),image("https://goo.gl/2VYg9Q"),IF(AND(C2<=5200, C2>=2501),image("https://goo.gl/87vY96"), IF(C2<=2500,image("https://goo.gl/aVgK1f")))))))))))

Modified embed code - I highlighted the part you add:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YeCoYjAp_n6d7q9UkmV3-WJ24OtMsHfLR43ryLmy6vA/pubhtml?gid=990555132&amp;single=true&amp;widget=true&amp;headers=false&amp;gid=0&amp;range=A1:D39" width="450" height="2350" ></iframe>

Of course, you can always make a copy of the document I used in the tutorial and modify it to suit your needs.

I invite you to play around with it. For example, you can add avatars or other images using

 =image("https://goo.gl/Bv19zc")

You will again need to host the images in a published document, shorten the URLs, and remember to modify the range, width and height if you are going to embed it anywhere. In this document, I show the avatars in the pivot table, and just like before they are ranked by XP.

I have not found a way to also include items or badges in the pivot page. When I try it, the totals are pushed to the very end, creating a rather messy look. However, you could always publish them in the leader board page, which keeps them in alpha order and could actually be an even better idea.


If you've found different ways of doing this or need some help, leave a comment. Don't be shy. We are in this journey together.

Gamified classroom - a year in review

About a year ago I set out to offer my students a complete gamified experience in my classroom (Setting up a Gamified Classroom). With quests, leaderboard  and student buy in we set out to train dragons, and overall it was a positive experience for both myself and the students.

My gamified classroom was set up so that the different units (quests) would unlock a power-up.  This meant that power-ups could not be accessed until we reached that unit.  This worked well for the students that wanted that power-up, and having all power-ups unlocked became a status symbol. The goal of having students revisit work (even if it was done months before) was achieved. In fact, a student that did not join us until the second semester took it upon herself to complete the previous units just so she could also unlock the powers.

On the flip side, I also had students that did not care about a particular power-up. Yes, the assignments were completed (as they would go in the gradebook), but my vision of having them revisit old work in order to earn the power-up did not materialize. However, this is not a failure  of the gamification experience, but rather missed opportunity on my part to find a way to encourage these students to refine work.

The "training the dragon" aspect was a different matter. The dragon training was tied to a weekly blog writing assignment and its end goal was to not have to do the assignment at all (blog immunity). Although only ten of the 140 students that I had this year reached the goal, most of them came close enough that they could taste it. I had students come up to me a couple of weeks before school ended asking, "If I write two blogs this week and score well, will they count towards blog immunity?" The logic of writing one post a week for the final two weeks vs. writing two posts in one week so they would not have to write a post the final week escaped them!

From the mechanics aspect, I will be honest and tell you that as much as I love my leaderboard, keeping up with it was not easy. A big part of the gamified experience for students is immediate feedback. In the real gaming world, students can immediately see if they have reached a goal or unlocked a power-up. In my classroom, they not only had to wait for the assignment to be graded and put into the leaderboard, but in the case of revisions, they also had to wait for me to be done with all other grading before I could even tackle revisions. Now, the students know and respect the fact that I do read through all of their work, and have a rather quick turn-around for grades. However, grouping the power-ups with the unit assignments meant that I was in fact keeping two gradebooks, sometimes with different scoring criteria. This is something that I will definitely be revisiting.

All that being said, I will continue on the gamification path. Wish me luck!

Setting up a gamified classroom

Last year I toyed with gamifying my classroom (Gamification starting really small), and while not everything went as planned (Gamification-lessons learned), this year I'm going ahead with a more complete experience.

Eventyr is the name of the realm. Each of my classes belongs to a clan and the purpose of playing the game is to train a dragon to the highest level possible, earning the rank of Supreme Grand Master.

Dragon training - Students start their journey as Noobs, and train their dragon by writing a weekly reflective blog. This blog awards XP points based on a rubric. Weekly leaders from each class gain blog immunity for that week. This means they do not have to write a blog, but they also do not earn XP that week. There are eight levels, with each rank becoming increasingly difficult to get. Students are able to go back and correct postings in order to gather more XP. The prize for achieving the highest rank is blog immunity for the rest of the year.

Power-ups - I also set up a series of power-ups that are tied to each of my units. The power-ups include things like listen to music, open note quizzes, use cell phones and such. The power-ups are gained if the student achieves at least an 85% of the total number of points in a given unit. This is what I am really excited about. Students can continue to improve upon the early submission even if we have moved on in the course. Why am I excited about this? I find it very frustrating when students turn in work that we both know is not their best effort, they get it back with detailed instructions on how to improve and it goes to the bottom of the backpack never to see the light of day again. The power-ups are privileges that my students have repeatedly asked for, so if they really want it they will need to revisit their work until it meets the standard.

Easter eggs - These are really my class participation points in disguise. Individual students or teams may gain extra XP during class discussions and activities. I am leaving myself open to when to give out Easter eggs so I can use them really to promote any display of good citizenship or behavior.

It is important to note that in my classroom XP are not tied to grades. There is a correlation between the two since students that score well will tend to initially have more XP, but since the main purpose for me is for students to revise their work, they might have gotten a low original grade and the grade-book closed, but since they revised the work, they can obtain a power-up after the fact. Last year, this separation allowed me to publish my leader board without getting any push-back from parents. The only comment I got was from a parent that stated that the public leader board actually made her daughter work harder because she really wanted to move up.

To keep track of all this, I created a Google spreadsheet. I explained how to do this and made one available for copying in a previous post.

Here are some other examples of XP grading in case you are interested:

Mrmatera
Gamingmatter
Teached Up Teacher

Leaderboards with Google Spreadsheets :)

I have spent the last week gamifying my 5th grade. I developed my theme, posted everything up and so forth. Then I came upon the "Hall of Honor", which is basically the leader board for my game. I had previously created a leaderboard for my blogs (see Gamification, starting really small), but this time, I wanted the sheet to automatically assign all badges (images) in response to inputting the XP scores.

I knew that I could just use something like Edmodo to keep track, but that meant that I would have to create a bunch of small groups and assign the badges manually. As much as I love Edmodo, this seemed like a hassle, and I could just see myself forgetting or clicking one student instead of another. I turned to my trusty internet in search of something already made, and although there were several sites that came up (Badgeville and Leaderboarded, for example), they did not meet my most basic need - "FREE".

So, with a very rudimentary understanding of Google Spreadsheets and the help of Youtube tutorials, I developed my own.

What the students see:

What the students don't see, and might be of interest to you:

The spreadsheet has one dedicated page for the leader board and then 9 others for the different units.
The data is pulled from the different sheets using the ImportRange function
All image URL's were shortened using https://goo.gl/
The images were placed inside the cells using =image("URL")
The ranks were assigned using formulas like :

=IF(B2>=300; "Supreme Grand Master";IF (AND(B2<=349;B2>=201); "Blogging Grand Master";IF (AND(B2<=200;B2>=161);"Master";IF(AND(B2<=160;B2>=121);"Magus";IF(AND(B2<=120; B2>=81);"Adept";IF(AND(B2<=80; B2>=61);"Journeyman";IF(AND(B2<=60; B2>=41);"Initiate";IF(AND(B2<=40; B2>=21);"Apprentice"; IF(B2<=20; "Novice" ; ""))))))))) - For text

 =IF(B2>=850; image("http://goo.gl/lnjj1i");IF (AND(B2<=849;B2>=750); image("http://goo.gl/vWDG5F");IF (AND(B2<=749;B2>=560);image("http://goo.gl/r8CoiU");IF(AND(B2<=559;B2>=420);image("http://goo.gl/MCq2UA");IF(AND(B2<=419; B2>=250);image("http://goo.gl/qQRxrZ");IF(AND(B2<=249; B2>=170);image("http://goo.gl/YtKEjl");IF(AND(B2<=168; B2>=85);image("http://goo.gl/XKdggM"); IF(B2<=84;image("http://goo.gl/JNWjSf") ; "")))))))) - For images

I could not figure out how to use just one formula for text and images AND that responded to the value of an imported range, all at the same time, so I solved the problem by populating an extra set of columns using import range (not shown to students) just with the values and then used =IF(M2>=100;image("http://goo.gl/f8Gjbj"); IF(M2<=99;"Locked";)) to display either the image or the word locked on the Unit cells. This made the look quite cluttered, so I went with white text on those cells.

My end result, a sheet that responds to and assigns badges automatically as soon as I update the individual values for a student. Since all is tied together, I can also sort the columns any which way I need without worrying about "messing up" someone's badges or XP points. Just be aware that changes are not instantaneous; it sometimes takes a little while to load and update everything.

If you would like to view the full spreadsheet, and perhaps make a copy to modify to fit your needs, click on the image.

I will still need to input the individual XP for the assignments myself, but I have saved myself from the tallying and badge awarding. I also think that if I'm careful about naming conventions with the students, I might just be able to automate the input of XP directly from Flubaroo graded assignments, or from Google Form assignments. Now wouldn't that be a dream?

If you find this useful, or if you have found other ways to do this, leave a comment. I know that I will be grateful.