Gamifying a Science Topic

I have just completed teaching Breathing, Respiration, Blood and Disease, and have created a GSite to accompany my lessons. I want my students to be able to independently access the resources they need to complete their eBooks and other tasks in and out of lessons.
Each page has the spec points, learning objectives, needed resources, YouTube clips/EdPuzzle/Versal/etc, GForm Quiz, Quizlet, GDrive folder of resources, past paper questions, GDrawing with links to BBC, ABPI, Memrise and DoddleLearn.

Each Google Form Quiz is graded with Fubaroo and set to autograde, or with the new Google Quiz functionality. Another sheet is used to import the data generated by Flubaroo into a Master sheet (template attached below) of all the quizzes in the topic. From here I use a combination of filters, joins, queries and vlookups to gather the students' scores together so that I can plot graphs of their performances and award them badges for reaching 80% and 100% in their sub-topics.

In the image above, I have achieved 100% in all 14 quizzes, gaining me gold badges (made from nounproject.org) in each of the four sub-topics. By achieving 100% in all quizzes, I have unlocked the Vampire Quest easter-egg level that is only available to those that max out all of the quizzes. I don't make that difficult as I have set Flubaroo to send the correct answers to the students after their first attempt (some students try to game the game but I keep an eye on them!)

The Vampire Quest is on a permissions based page that the students must request access to. I check that they are worthy and grant them access to a page which has instructions, 3 UnLife Lines and the first of 14 or 15 puzzles. I have included content from history, maths, biology, chemistry, art, PE, and an array of searching skills and app use including QR codes, YouTube, Google Street View, GForms, etc. that are aimed at busting the mythology of vampires. (a folder of resources is linked below)

I have based some of the puzzles on BreakoutEdu.com and have utilised 2 x 5 letter word locks, a directional lock, a dial combination lock, and 2 UV torches. The quest finishes with one last form being submitted that triggers Autocrat to create a certificate with the position the student has completed the quest in. Unlike BreakOutEdu, I have left the clues and puzzles all over the school, so this is more like a virtual and real space quest / amazing race!

The interesting part of the whole site is how the students interact with it. Some are extrinsically motivated by the graphs and want to see a complete set, while some are compelled to gather the gold badges. I have not set any of the quizzes as homework because I am interested to see if the students will complete them by themselves, and whether they will do the Vampire Quest of their own volition. All I have done is have my page open at the start of lessons with all the graphs at 100%, the badges all gold, and the Vampire button visible, in order to let them see what a complete set looks like and that I have it and they don't. The completion of the quizzes by the students and their returning to the quiz to get 100% tells me about the student: are they independent and resilient in their learning? Do they want to improve themselves and have a growth mindset? Useful information particularly at parents' evening where I show the parent my teacher GSheet dashboard with all of their child's performances in all of my assessments including this!

Click here for the images etc used for the clues
Some of the clues are specific to my school and students but the idea of an open quest is what I was trying to achieve and be able to replicate as a framework.

Click here for GSheet Master Template with Vampire Quest Forms attached + sheets with the imported Flubaroo quizzes. The sheet has all of the necessary formulae and functions built in.

Gamification, Rubrics and Levels (or life after them!)

We have been gamifying education for a long time and it has worked along the same lines; if you do this, you will get this - certificates, grades, badges, stamps, achievement points, etc. So, gamification isn't a new thing, indeed gamifying the classroom/course isn't a new thing.

Rubrics have also been around for some time. The British curricula tend to focus on the grade descriptors as a basic rubric, leaving the teachers to fill in the gaps. Level assessed tasks are examples of basic rubrics but they tend not to be built in a manner that shows clear progression. It is progression that was demonstrated by the Assessing Pupil Progress rubrics that made them good for letting the teachers see what students were capable of doing and allowing the students to identify for themselves, and provide evidence for, the level they were working at. 

It seems to me that the use of rubrics is a no-brainer as they clearly define capabilities that can be evidenced: if you can do this, this is your level! Students have control over the level they achieve at and I have noticed that students who are willing to try can achieve very well in this form of assessment while not necessarily be strong under exam conditions.

For my masters degree all of the work I submitted was assessed using rubrics that were made available at the start of the task, along with exemplars, to give an idea of what was expected and the format expected. There was no guess work; I knew exactly what was required of me and I only ever looked at the column on the rubrics that would gain me 100% for the tasks. With this type of assessment, the teacher/instructor can be completely objective, particularly where skills are being demonstrated but that is not to say a rubric could not be used to record understanding of a concept using a Bloom's taxonomy style rubric. A task that asks students to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and application of a concept could be constructed using describe, explain and suggest command words:

Describe the flow of blood through the heart and circulatory system

Explain why the heart rate increases during exercise

Suggest what will happen to the heart rate at high altitudes; explain your thinking.

Tasks statements like these can be built into a rubric quite easily as they stand or could be broken down further.

Describe the flow of blood through the heart and circulatory system

0 - not done

10 - correct description of blood flow through the double circulatory system.

20 - 10 + all blood vessels, including capillaries, correctly named in the description.

30 - 20 + the flow of blood through the chambers of the heart correctly named and in order.

Explain why the heart rate increases during exercise

0 - not done

10 - the need for more oxygen to be delivered to appropriate respiring cells for aerobic respiration

20 - 10 + the need to deliver more fuel to respiring cells and remove the waste products as they increase to be excreted by the appropriate tissue

30 - 20 + the need to deal with the products of anaerobic respiration.

Suggest what will happen to the heart rate at high altitudes; explain your thinking

0 - not done

10 - correct reference to the activity of the heart

20 - 10 + correct reference to oxygen concentration at higher altitudes

30 - 20 + correct explanation of why the heart rate changes in relation to aerobic respiration and respiring cells.

Admittedly, it is quite easy to slip in markscheme writing when creating these but I purposefully left out the detail that a markscheme would have in order for the students to have to think about their answer, look it up, and write it in a coherent, structured sentence. In this regard, it might simply be easier to give students exam questions that ask use these command words!

If we consider that the writing of a science investigation to be a skill, and that the elements of writing it can be separated and practiced for, and that each element of the writeup could have rubric statements applied to them, could we not gamify this with graphs and badges? We already do this with grades! Could that rubric be built for progression from KS3 through to 5? The Edexcel GCSE Biology controlled assessment writeup requirements are very closely aligned to Edexcel AS Biology and would be a very good scaffold for writing investigations by Y12. Compared to the use of CORMS for planning in the Edexcel iGCSE, the controlled assessment is considerably better AS preparation as it considers analysis, conclusions and the use of secondary data. 

Life without levels is bringing up some interesting points in schools. What are schools doing to replace levels? Are they even bothering? https://nomoremarking.com/ suggests that the way forward is by comparative marking that is "seeded" with pieces of work that represent a grade boundary; for summative pieces of work I can see how this might work at the national level, but someone still had to generate the seeded work and decide upon what criteria the grade boundary represented. What is the difference between this and what we do now? Teachers will still need to use these exemplars to standardise their marking and be able to tell students what they need to be doing to improve.

gClassDojo V2, Teacher Feedback and Student Reflection in GSites

I built a Google/ATG Class Dojo last year (https://sites.google.com/a/alice-smith.edu.my/googleclassdojo/home) and found a need recently to use it more seriously.

The upgrade, apart from a bit of CSS make-up ;), shows the scores each student has achieved in the dashboard I look at; these scores are graphed in the student page using a Google Apps Script. More importantly, there is a pre-filled GForm (blue button) that allows me to give feedback to the students on particularly important tasks. The form uses DocAppender to write the feedback into a GDoc that is embedded for the students (shared with Doctopus) in my teacher site (uses ATG proxy) and uses Form Notifier to email the students that I have posted something. Below the buttons in the image above, the comments I have written are presented back to me so that I can quickly scan them before making other posts; rather useful to see if repeated behaviour or progression has occurred.

The identified need was to have my comments/feedback appear in one place, and for the students be able to see the development of feedback for each piece of work that they do; my students use GDocs  and various other apps that live in the cloud and aren't necessarily in one place-certainly not in a paper file-and I mark them online in the native app. The GDoc is shared with the students with comment access so they are able to write/edit the doc and it sends me notifications as the comments are created: the conversation occurs.

The other parts of the student page show their test scores (ATG Proxy), a link to their GDrive folder that I share at the start of the course with Doctopus (ATG Proxy), a GForm for student reflections on their test performances with their submissions embedded back into the page (ATG Proxy), and the student's gClassroomDojo scores as a graph.