Classcraft: Week 2

The classcraft saga continues. My students now are trying to do everything in their power to earn gold. They have cleaned my classroom, found articles, and completed assignments early. Students are so focused on "helping me" that it actually has become a bit annoying. Too much of a good thing I guess? However, this was the first week that I introduced the website to my seniors. They are starting their major research papers, which the IB calls the internal assessment. This IA is basically their term paper. They must either research a topic and accumulate data from primary sources, or they need to conduct an experiment and report on their findings. Last year I struggled to keep the seniors on task and motivated. This year, with the help of classcraft, I have turned their IAs into a game. At each checkpoint, assuming they have adequately completed their assignments, they will gain a level. At each level, students are able to equip their character with new get and collect new pets. The motivation in the first week alone is significantly higher than it has been for the last two years. 

The other new classcraft endeavor this week were the "boss battles". In my junior classes, the students were given a pop quiz. They were to work in teams to answer questions. However,  there was no competition between the teams. They were all working together to defeat the "boss". Every time the students answered a question correctly, the boss took damage. However, if the students answered incorrectly, the boss did damage to their whole team. It became very high stakes when there were no longer enough questions to defeat the boss. However, there was a random chance that when damage was done to the boss, it would inflict a "critical hit", doing double damage. On the second to last question, there was a crit! The whole class when wild. There were students jumping out of their seats and running around the classroom. On the next question, the students defeated the boss and each student was awarded gold and experience. It was an outrageous success.

My only wish for the Classcraft program is to have that same quizzing platform, but allow individual students to take the quizzes on their own screens. As of right now, the only way to have "boss battles" is to put them up on the projector screen. They are continuing to roll out new updates, and I am hoping this is one of them!