LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

programming

Trying to find some loot

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Dear ******,

It was nice to speak with you during last week’s Tech Crawl. I was the teacher working on gamifying his high school programming class. I was also the guy who handed out the flyer full of typos. How embarrassing.

My students are starting to get into the spirit of gamification and it’s interesting to see that there’s not just one thing that’s motivating them. Some of them are interested in being near the top of the leaderboards. Some of them are interested in leveling up and getting to pick perks from the “perk tree.” Some of them are interested in the idea of getting loot when they level up, and some of them just seem to like the idea that programming class is going to be different from the rest of their day.

As you might recall, my mission was to find Nebraska tech companies who were interested in promoting the creation of more home grown Nebraska programmers. At the university level they are telling us that they don’t have as many students applying to the Computer Science program. My goal is to encourage high school programming students to excel at programming by gamifying our programming class.

One part of this gamification process is to provide loot to students as they “Level Up.” Would ****** like to provide some loot? Loot could take many forms. Here are some ideas that occurred to me, but I’m more interested in ideas that you have:

  1. Any sort of swag (um, I mean promotional materials): t-shirts, hats, mugs, flashlights,  usb drives… it doesn’t really matter. High schoolers like to get things.
  2. Stuff you have lying around. What do you do with your old (but still reasonable) computer equipment? We’re a 501c and we’d be happy to give you a donation receipt. (This actually applies to the rest of these ideas as well.)
  3. If you want to provide some non-swag things, gift cards are nice. Fast food, iTunes, anything really. Tickets to a game or show?  They are kids who were geeky enough to pick a programming class, so anything technology related would be good and fit the theme.
  4. Something less tangible maybe?  A personal tour of ****** and lunch with the boss? The chance at a summer intern position for someone who reaches the highest level? You wouldn’t want to offer that to everyone who reaches level 5, but we can talk about that.

Again, just some ideas. I’m open to anything.

How much do we need? I have 20 students (that’s 10% of our student body), so if there is something you want every student to have we would need 20 of it, and we would offer it as loot at a relatively low level. Anything in smaller quantities -and smaller quantities are fine- we would offer at higher levels. I would be happy to pick things up if that makes it easier on your end.

Thanks for anything you care to do to help encourage students to excel at programming, and if you have any questions or suggestions, I would love to hear them.

If you want to check up on our class, you can find us at: http://programming.lincolnlutheran.org

At this point there are new leaderboards, achievement, perks and so on being added every week. There’s also a blog if you’re interested in how things are turning out.

You actually have two of my former programming students working for you now: Derek Guenther and Rees Klintworth.

Lloyd Sommerer
teacher/technology coordinator
Lincoln Lutheran High School

Gamification and Programming

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So, while Lauren has been heating up and cooling down multiple times a day, I’ve been working on trying something new with my programming class.

For the last couple of years people have been experimenting with using common elements in games in classrooms. It’s called Gamification, and it’s not playing games in class. People have been doing that for a long time. It’s turning the whole class into a game. People are also doing it outside of education too. You’ve maybe been gamified yourself without knowing it. If you want to know more about it in general, watch this video:

Okay, everything make sense now?

I’ve been working on how this will look in my class, and in a nutshell, students will still do (mostly) all of the same stuff I’ve had them do in this class for years. But this time around, they will get points for doing them and when they get enough points they will go up a level and when they go up a level they can pick certain perks. Additionally, they can see on Leaderboards how the rest of the class is doing and earn Achievements for doing certain things well.

Gamification Design Documents

See, Mom, I knew all those hours playing video games were going to pay off for me.

Gamification Design Documents

If you’re really interested, you can take a look at the Programming website. I’ve already rolled out a few of the leaderboards, I’m also keeping a list of useful resources and making some posts about how I’m doing things, why I’m doing them that way and how they are turning out. I’ve done 4 posts so far.

3 years and no photo

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This is the third year in a row that I’ve taught my One Really Good Lesson™ and forgotten to take pictures. After we take care of boring procedural things, the first things that we do in programming class is have a picnic.

It’s usually blasted hot at the start of school so we have the picnic in the air-conditioned commons. But this year the weather has been relatively nice, so I setup two tables under a tree in a little courtyard area that we have. I spread out traditional checkered tablecloths on the tables (pushed together to make one big square table) and made things look nice. The students went to our normal classroom and found these instructions on the board:

Go South.
Bring chair.

Once everyone is there, I spread out all the tools and fixins to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and tell them that I would be glad to make sandwiches for them if only they would tell me how.

Grab Bread is my favorite.

I play the “oh so literal” computer, and they learn things like precision, thinking ahead, looping, procedures and other programming things. I didn’t get as messy this year as I usually do.

Fantasy Baseball Files

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This collection of fantasy baseball files was created by readers of the Fantasy Baseball Cafe Forums. It includes documents for preparing for a draft/auction and documents for running one.

If you have a document that has worked well for you and you want to offer it to others, please email it to me, and I’ll add it to the list. Please include a brief description like the ones below and whether I can add your email address. If you’ve significantly modified a file that is already here, I’d like to include that as well.

MyMiniCity WordPress Plugin

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This WordPress plugin displays statistics for your www.myminicity.com town. It also provides links to the various URLs associated with your MiniCity as they are needed. I spent a while looking for a plugin that would do this, and finally decided that this would be a good chance for me to learn how to write WordPress plugins. So this is my first plugin, and it could probably use some work. But it wouldn’t be working at all if not for the Ronald Huereca’s How to Write a WordPress Plugin article.