AlgebraHut.com Blog

The spring semester ended about a month ago.  So what sorts of neat things have I accomplished?  Almost nothing!  I am totally wasting my time.  Not wasting, but there have been lots of family (in-law) interactions in the past month, most of them positive.  The house is almost back to normal and I am just now getting into the mood to be productive.

The only thing I’ve done any work on really has been redesigning my course(s) (this isn’t entirely true; I am teaching a class right now and have been tying up loose ends at work and finishing up a online course, but I still feel like I’ve been lazy). 

I have been wanting to redesign my classes to be more game-like and objectives-based.  In a nutshell, you do this task and you get this reward, plus you might unlock new tasks which will lead to new rewards, etc.

So far, I’ve created a proto-type of a badge to be used to award students for mastering a task or doing an activity successfully.

Square Root Badge

When a student masters simplifying square roots, they will be awarded this badge, along with 50-100points, and the ability to earn other badges.

This badge was created using the Open Office Draw program, which is FREE!  It’s no photoshop, but it does a decent job and did I mention it is FREE!?

I’ve also worked up a blueprint for how I’d like to implement this game-like mechanic into my classes.  My emphasis is on ease-of-use.  I don’t want this to take up too much time.  I will make it secure, so that students cannot cheat the system, but at the same time make it so that it will normally only take 2 clicks and possibly a password to award a badge. 

I am hoping to set it up so that I can share this system with other teachers interested in doing something similar.  I don’t plan on trying to integrate it into any particular LMS, because there are too many out there and they are fairly proprietary (meaning they might not like it if I try to add-on).  So this will have to be stand alone.

This may be too ambitious, but I would like to integrate this system with social media, like facebook and twitter, so that when a student earns a badge, it will be sent to their facebook or twitter stream.

On a related note, I need to get working on posting videos of my lecture examples online.  I have decided to script it first, which will mean that it is going to take some time, but it will be worth it and I will make the script available with the video, for the hearing impaired and those learners who prefer reading to watching a video.

I’ll let you know when I start churning those out.  Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin