Link to blog post: Themes, teams, and side quests: a superhero's guide to gamification.
This blog post gave some practical ways to introduce gamification into a classroom. Laura Steinbrink teaches high school English and does superhero-themed gamification. She has her students separate into teams, come up with a superhero team name as well as individual superhero names. Then she issues challenges to them throughout the week that extend their learning inside and outside of the classroom. As they complete the challenges, they get points. Sometimes the challenges involve enacting scenes from a novel during lunch and recording them. Other times, they involve breakout rooms. She actually included a breakout room planning template in the blog post, which you can find here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yxoixxNsiC_diGpBVhM0EA-Uz_jugZ_j7-wyLEe-Jqw/edit)
I decided to use the template to design a breakout room for our next major unit, which is research skills. I created this document (https://docs.google.com/document/d/19jl_kRMNkUCz9u2X0i4dUeDTur-7Zusti9PdPOLfGsU/edit?usp=sharing) to prepare for a possible breakout room for reviewing research skills. The gist is that students will work together as superhero researchers to find out who kidnapped the four superheroes defending the Earth. Whenever they solve a task related to research skills (vocab, bias, evaluating, citing), they are given an emoji. The emoji is entered into codemoji, and entering the correct code gives the student two letters. After solving four puzzles, the students have all 8 letters of the villain’s name (the snake). They select a snake emoji in codemoji to find out where the Snake has hidden the heroes. They get coordinates, which when entered into Google Earth take them to Groom Lake. Searching for Groom Lake in Google will show them it is actually Area 51.
I think this would be a fun way to wrap up a unit on research skills before students begin final projects. It’s just a quick way to test their skills and knowledge, but it’s engaging.
This blog post gave some practical ways to introduce gamification into a classroom. Laura Steinbrink teaches high school English and does superhero-themed gamification. She has her students separate into teams, come up with a superhero team name as well as individual superhero names. Then she issues challenges to them throughout the week that extend their learning inside and outside of the classroom. As they complete the challenges, they get points. Sometimes the challenges involve enacting scenes from a novel during lunch and recording them. Other times, they involve breakout rooms. She actually included a breakout room planning template in the blog post, which you can find here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yxoixxNsiC_diGpBVhM0EA-Uz_jugZ_j7-wyLEe-Jqw/edit)
I decided to use the template to design a breakout room for our next major unit, which is research skills. I created this document (https://docs.google.com/document/d/19jl_kRMNkUCz9u2X0i4dUeDTur-7Zusti9PdPOLfGsU/edit?usp=sharing) to prepare for a possible breakout room for reviewing research skills. The gist is that students will work together as superhero researchers to find out who kidnapped the four superheroes defending the Earth. Whenever they solve a task related to research skills (vocab, bias, evaluating, citing), they are given an emoji. The emoji is entered into codemoji, and entering the correct code gives the student two letters. After solving four puzzles, the students have all 8 letters of the villain’s name (the snake). They select a snake emoji in codemoji to find out where the Snake has hidden the heroes. They get coordinates, which when entered into Google Earth take them to Groom Lake. Searching for Groom Lake in Google will show them it is actually Area 51.
I think this would be a fun way to wrap up a unit on research skills before students begin final projects. It’s just a quick way to test their skills and knowledge, but it’s engaging.