When given a survey at the end of last school year, my students ranked their favorit parts of our gamification. The piece with the highest interest was the XP money and the class store. Based on their responses, my students are highly motivated to do well on their work so they can buy snacks and trinkets from the store. When they run out of money, I have found that they do more work than is required in order to earn extra money. For example, they are required to read and answer comprehension questions on two online articles a week. For those who run out of money quickly, they sometimes for three or four articles to earn the extra cash so they can buy more snacks or water bottles each day. They are in control of the work they complete and how much they earn, just like they would be in a real world situation if they were at a job. I pay them for their work, then they must budget their money or work more to maintain their “lifestyle” in class. It has been a great experiment and I hope to expand this strategy into more classrooms in the high school I work at to improve motivation in other classrooms where teachers are struggling to motivate students in traditional ways.
Above: Pictures of our classroom store and leaderboard winner posters.
Below: Screenshots of the online leaderboards where student XP earnings are
recorded and displayed.
The leaderboard Sheet is available for student viewing at any time within our Google Classroom.