Gamification: Achievement Unlocked

Gamification: Achievement Unlocked engages students to self-assess their knowledge and progress, and reflect on presented course content. As part of a gamified system educators create or reframe each of 3 online non-assessment quizzes as missions. Successful completion of each mission levels a student up towards unlocking bonus support/learning materials and resources.

Rationale

Gamification: Achievement Unlocked, through quizzes framed as missions, gives students the opportunity to reinforce their learning.

Learners/Context

Gamification: Achievement Unlocked is designed for first year
students to support the acquisition of discipline specific knowledge. Students need to self-assess their learning and progress, and set learning for successful completion of summative assessment. These fun missions (quizzes) are formative assessments and on completion the student gains some subject specific reward. The students can complete the quizzes online or in a face to face situation.

Alignment

This activity scaffolds student learning and reinforces course knowledge and skill.

Instructions/Processes

Prior to Semester

Create a pool of questions for each mission (test). Try to vary the question types and make them informal and motivating. Select Multiple Attempts to allow the students to repeat the quiz if needed. You may also wish to offer the added gameful threat of setting a timer to the mission.
Mark the mission as unavailable until you are ready to release it. By default, a Blackboard (Bb) test will be included in Grade Center calculations. To allow students to take tests as formative self-assessment, select Hide Results for this Test Completely from Instructor and the Grade Center.
- Design to launch the mission at key stages in the course delivery with a set date. The threshold for rewards should be set for a level to be attainable by all students who engage.
- Allocate point values to the completion of each mission. For instance completion of a mission might be a score of 100% for quizzes with unlimited attempts available. As in games the three ‘missions’ might be progressively harder or more complex and points could be allocated to match, for instance 50, 100 and 200 points and bonus 20 points for 100% on the first attempt.
  OR
  For a whole tutorial group make the scoring as an accumulative score. So for instance a tutorial threshold might be 3,000 points when a reward resource is released to the whole tutorial group.
- Carefully select the rewards to be “unlocked” by students when they level up (successfully complete each mission).
- “Unlocking” could be as simple as emailing students a link to the reward resource or an invitation to a restricted Google document of reward resource/s.
- The rewards need to be valued study aids or support for students. This could include for instance access to expert examples of a critical essay or other high quality resources like a sample exam, an online exam rehearsal, mentoring time or a master class.
- These rewards are only attained through successful completion of the missions.

During the Semester

Explain to students the value self-assessment, the role of gamification and the conditions of unlocking the rewards.
Explain to students that these missions are not graded; student completions are added to a class spreadsheet to show individual status and progress.
- This could be a locked Google Spreadsheet (educator only writes to) or an open spreadsheet for student self-identification of completed tasks and scores.
- Here is a guide for how to create such a spreadsheet (including levelling in this case it could be 3 levels for three missions etc). It includes links to sample sheets
- If choosing to record and display a leaderboard in a tutorial, students update their progress as required.
When each student has reached the threshold (number of missions completed), “unlock” the reward activity or prizes.
Make an announcement as each mission is released and remind students of the reward they will unlock.
Check the Google Spreadsheet to identify the muddiest point for students and explain these concepts in class.