TIC: The RPG

Inspired by all the articles, videos and research I had read about teachers using gaming elements to inspire additional motivation in their students, I was determined to try to incorporate some of these ideas into my usual teaching stint at the Academic Talent Development Program. Through a veritable hodgepodge of technologies, my two co-instructors and I turned The Internet Classroom into a series of questing, leveling, gaining rewards, and battling.
medium
Java / PHP / MySQL
completed
Summer 2010
One of the eternal challenges in teaching The Internet Classroom came in the form of incoming students having a wide variety of previous experience levels: some may use computers and the internet on a daily basis already, while others may have only ever seen a computer in their local school or library. To address this experiential gap, we went with an almost self-paced system of assignments which, in the spirit of RPGs, we called "quests". Students were able to complete quests at their own pace and proceeded as quickly as they could wanted or as slowly as they needed.
Once a student completed a quest and uploaded it to their provided web space, s/he reported to their assigned TA to "turn in". The TA would check to make sure all of the requirements of the quest were met, then record the completion on a shared Google document, which would automatically add the quest's rewards to the student's total. As students completed quests, they received experience points and "leveled up". In addition, once a student reached a given level, they would then become eligible to take a quiz that would permit them to unlock the next set of quests. This helped to ensure that students were really learning and understanding one set of material before they could continue on to the next tier of content.
In addition to earning experience points, students were also able to earn virtual currency, which could in turn be spent on purchasing virtual items. These items were used strictly in the Arena, which was a dueling system that was moderated by a chatbot in the class website's chatroom. The battle system was a simplified version of a typical trading card game, in which students could build miniature "decks" of items with inherent weaknesses and strengths. A tournament was held on the last day of the course in which students could earn real prizes for placing well.
View the store. An example account is available with username "guest" and password "asdf".
Students could also earn achievements by completing certain sets of quests, which would indicate some level of 'mastery' over particular topics. In addition to netting them additional currency and stat points for battling, students who had earned achievements would be able to see them in their forum signature through use of a custom-written PHP signature generator. This also included a miniaturized version of what students' decks contained, as well as their level.
For students who were uninterested in the battling element, we also offered to exchange credits for raffle tickets for two separate drawings held at the ending of the course, again for physical prizes. There were also a few (expensive) methods for helping to raise the student's grade, though we were careful to design these in such a way that students were still be rewarded for the actual work they've done, rather than being able to just "buy" point increases.
View the Arena FAQ.
design
Cynthia Nie, Sam Pierce
coding
Cynthia Nie
art
Sam Pierce
category
Games
tags
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