What's the Story, Morning Glory?

I've been trying to gamify my classes for a few years now, and to minor success at best. Despite the greatest of intentions, and despite putting hours and hours into it, I found that I had only established a very shallow attempt at a game. Or, even worse, the "chocolate-covered broccoli" effect often referred to when talking about poorly-formed gamified classes. XP grading and some items and perks were working somewhat, but it wasn't enough to get every kid. Or even, most kids. It was just... school with a different grading scheme.

I suppose I've always found it difficult to find the time to devote to this. I do recall at different time thinking about how I wished I'd come across gamification of the classroom before I had kids, years earlier when I might have had more time outside of school to put towards making this occur. What changed of late though is actually kind of surreal to say, but this time of Covid has given me the time I needed. Then again, maybe I finally got to the point where I didn't need to keep making lesson plans as I'd reached the point where they were all done, but the fact remains that I've been able to put hours and hours into this since March 2020.

And it feels like it's going to work! I'm about ready to beta-test in January ahead of the end of the first semester, but I've put in the time to make my Grade 10 Promotions class run on a Hunger Games (books and movie) story, and my Grade 11 Retailing class run on a Superstore (tv show) story. And what makes it even better - the internet is chock-full of clips to make it happen!

And with these established universes already created, I didn't have to do anything crazy like invent an entire story. All I needed to do was create something on the side to push us all forward until we reach the next clip/cutscene. And using some incredibly ideas that the #XPLAP community consistently puts out, I also have two seperate game methods to go along with it.

The Hunger Games-themed class will operate like an RPG with weapons, armour and items that can be found or purchased with tokens earned by doing work, which will then affect how the boss-battles go as unit-ending "faux-assessments", while the Superstore-themed class will involve earning tokens by doing work which will then purchase inventory for the store (guild) that the students will be broken up into, and then a dice-mechanic game will be used to determine which store wins and which ones get shut-down by head office.

And I've been able to come up with items and perks and game mechanics based off of these games. But again, I don't think I'd be here without the stories that I've harnessed and used as inspiration.

I've also created some individual status screens via Google Sheets (as seen above), a Glide app for both classes that shows students their progress and their inventory, and have an auto-grading system to do some of the more motonous grading systems which should ideally leave me more time to act as Gamemaster.

I've also started planning ahead to my grade 12 Marketing class by incorporating Scott Pilgrim vs. The World which is my guilty-pleasure favorite movie of all time. It just so happens that the bad guy runs a corporation which manipulates their customers to buy stuff, which is another perfect fit!

All that's left to do now is some beta-testing, and that starts on Monday. So hopefully I can really start off 2021 on the right foot! Wish me luck!