Gamified Homework: Climb Every Mountain

This second example of gamification takes a slightly different and less organisationally-complex approach to setting homework than its Earn-to-Learn predecessor.

It does this by adopting the mechanics of a game board: all students start at the same point and work their way to the top (or end-point) by traversing different levels. In this particular example I’ve created three levels, but there’s no reason why you can’t extend this to add more levels if required.

To understand how the gamified design works, have a look at the PowerPoint Board file:

1. The first level of the Board contains a set of relatively low-mark questions. Students can select as many as they like to complete for homework, with the objective being to “escape the level” by matching or exceeding a pre-specified “level mark”. In the example I’ve provided students need to score 15+ marks to go to the next level but this can, of course, be adjusted to whatever score you like.

A student could, for example, select a couple of higher mark questions (10 and 6) to complete. If they score full-marks they complete the level. If, on the other hand, they score 12 marks they would need to complete further homework questions in order to successfully complete the level.

2. Once a student has achieved the requirements for level 3 they have completed that set of homework tasks. If you want to extended individual students further you can, if you wish, set “advanced levels” for them to complete.

I’ve provided the “Families and Households” question Board as a PowerPoint file to make it easy for you to tweak and edit it to suit your own particular course.

Variations

A variation you may want to consider is that instead of putting homework questions directly on the Board you simply indicate the marks available for each “question square”, as in this blank game board.

When a student chooses, say, a 10-mark question you can give them a prepared question that corresponds to the mark box they’ve chosen. Alternatively, as with Earn-to-Learn, you could have a prepared list of 2 / 6 / 10 mark questions and students can select the ones they want to do from the list.

This variation means that you don’t have to physically add questions to the game board, which makes it easy to reuse for other topics. All you may need to do is adjust the marks for each question box, depending on the topic being covered.