A post for Jesse

     I recently had the opportunity to speak with a former student of mine about this idea of gamification. He's played games like World of Warcraft and would be mortified if I called him out here, so I'll just call him Jesse.

     I explained the basic premise to Jesse something like this: "Essentially, the idea goes like this: In class, I assign students work. They do it, hopefully learning something and get a grade for it. Now, think of a videogame. You get a quest. You do it, learn how it works and get experience and rewards for doing it. Depending on the game and the quest, sometimes you can do it over and over again, improving each time and learning more and more from it."

     Jesse laughed at me. "That's so nerdy! People are just going to laugh at you. All you're doing is doing the same thing and calling it something different."

     No, it's not quite the same thing. There will be badges. They're virtual badges, yeah, but they'd exist and be there. (Even XBOX achievements are virtual badges). These badges help denote certain things.

     There would be a leveling system. Now, the question is how far and how exactly, but it would exist. Perhaps each "assignment" or "Quest" would give a certain amount of experience plus a certain amount of 'gold' -- the gold could be used to buy your grade and the XP would go to apply to your level. Bear with me, here, this is just an IDEA now. I'm throwing things up here to see how they look and if they'd work.

     As you level, you'd gain skills and feats. Eventually, there could be feats as powerful as "Once per test, have the teacher check your answer on a single test question."

     There could be static rewards, such as "earn a piece of candy"

     There's lots of ways to do this.

     Over at classrealm, he tracks individual levels and CLASS levels. When the class reaches a certain point, they get rewards, including material things like an ice cream party.

     Another thing he does at Classrealm is allow students to choose their own classes. You can see more of this here. He does some pretty cool things, in my opinion.

     One of the things that sold me on this idea was the following video. Watch it and LISTEN. Listen to the logic. It makes sense. Then why am I not doing it yet?