Let's take a look at how far Katie and Connor have leveled up their characters.
The Character Sheets
Katie, if you remember selected a wizard character sheet. She successfully leveled up her character to a forth tier wizard, known as a "Journeyman".
Connor, selected the military character sheet. He was promoted to the forth rank of "Sergeant".
The Difference
But, character sheets aside, let's take a look at what we really accomplished. Katie, finished the year with all A's in a schedule that was virtually all AP classes. And it was her first year in middle school to boot. Pretty impressive after hearing several times from teachers during orientation that "making the jump from elementary school to middle school is a big jump and even the ones that are used to making all A's end up with a few B's or even C's." (Yeah, what a great pep talk to give to the kids during orientation.)
Connor, showed a huge turn around from the beginning of the year (pre-academy) to the end of the year. His first report card read as follows:
- Language Arts: 76
- Reading: 71
- Math: 89
- Science: 84
- Social Studies: 87
- PE: 91
- Art: 95
- Music: 95
That's not too bad a report card. But on top of all this he had behavior problems. There were lots of negative notes regarding behavior in his folder at the beginning of the year, to the point that a parent/teacher conference was called. That is the point at which we started the academy.
After we started the academy program things began to change almost instantly. To be clear, I'm not saying he didn't have ANY other problems, but they were much fewer in frequency. He was always very excited to total his points (grades) and see if he had leveled up his character again. Each time he leveled up (4 in total), he was rewarded with an approximately $20 prize.
His behavior turned around, as did his participation in classwork, and his grades.
Connor's final report card looked like this:
- Language Arts: 81
- Reading: 82
- Math: 89
- Science: 91
- Social Studies: 90
- PE: 91
- Art: 95
- Music: 94
Not only that, but he turned things around early and fast enough that he ended up making the A/B Honor Roll for cumulative grades throughout the year!
We couldn't be more proud of him.
But his improvement also speaks for what a difference becoming engaged with the schoolwork helped him stay focused and gave him a goal to shoot for. It took schoolwork and put it into terms he could immediately relate to, leveling up. It took grades (which he wasn't looking forward to getting) and turned them into experience points, something he wanted to gather as much as possible in any way he could.
Things we learned
1. It was virtually impossible to level the playing field in terms of experience points if the curriculum is different between two players. Katie had one less class than Connor did, but she ended up having many more grades than Connor. He kept wanting to race her and compete with her but it was obvious early on that it wasn't going to be a fair match (even if Connor made 100's on all his grades).
So it would be great for people in the same classes, but it was a little discouraging for Connor to see all Katie's experience points. We tried our best to level things out with 'behavior points' but it still didn't quite make up the difference.
2. We need a better way to track the experience points. Although the numbers seemed to work out ok for leveling up it became very cumbersome to manually track all the grade experience, the bonus experience, and the previously recorded experience through the schools website. An online system probably needs to be created to make this easier.
3. It seemed to work. We have results, even if the process wasn't perfect. We saw Connor visibly get excited about doing homework, and bragging when he got a lot of bonus behavior experience points. And we saw a strong improvement in his grades. The funny thing is, it really didn't take a lot to get him engaged and get him to improve. He just immediately understood the rules and 'the game'.
Moving Forward
This summer we may see if we can put together some sort of experience point scoring system, a "Quest or Mission Results" system. Next year we plan on building on this year's results. Probably giving out more "extra missions/quests" than we did and promoting other learning activities.
I can't wait.
