Pulling Out An Oldie but Goodie

When implementing a PBL as a voluntary activity, it is imperative to find ways to keep the learners engaged. To ensure that all of the DILo Project teams were maintaining their passion for this student voice project, along with keeping up with the deadlines, we decided to add a gamification motivator. I pulled out of the hat one of my favorite tools to use when I was in the classroom; Class Dojo. Each weekly expectation, including collaborating with their Huckabee Architect and TCU Design Coach, holding virtual meetings, participating in discussions using Slack and photo and video logging their journey was assigned a point value for completing each task. The students are already stoked about being empowered to change not only the way they learn, but have a voice in what their learning environment is like, but feeding the competitive nature took collaboration to another level! Students are now using the weekly tasks for the project to develop their own rubric as they decide on how many points they can earn. It's been great to see the teams strategize and increase the intensity in their collaborative activities due to adding the gamification component. Weekly, we reward the team with the most points by providing dinner opportunities for their evening meetings held on campus. We do this also because we are very impressed that the teams actually meet after school sometimes until 7:00 PM to accommodate other extra-curricular obligations that members may have. This goes to show that if you make the learning relevant and empowering, students will truly go the extra mile. However, a little competition doesn't hurt either.