Salting the Oats

This coming school year, I am teaching Physical Science in addition to AP Biology.  This class is not at LCS, but at a local homeschool consortium. Last year, I taught Living Environment there and had one of my least favorite classes ever.  I had taught the same class the year before and had a good mix of motivated/unmotivated students.  This past year though, the balance was off, with a much stronger unmotivated portion.  I'm not talking about struggling students either, but capable kids who didn't seem concerned about their grade.  I know it's not about the grades, but the grades were reflecting a lack of learning.  It wasn't unusual to have more than half the class not turn in an assignment at all. (Yes, I kept in touch with parents and yes, I worked on tweaking the class as we went to try to pull them in.) I kept thinking, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." But then my mom's voice chimed in with, "But you can salt its oats!"

As I was thinking about this coming year, I focused on "salting the oats." I had read, Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess and then I read Explore Like a Pirate by Michael Matera, and decided that I was going to gamify Physical Science.

I used the NGSS from NY State (p. 28-35 of the document) to divide our book into units. At first I was going to make a badge that students would earn for each NGSS Middle School Physical Science learning objective that they mastered. With a couple of chapters not having LO's attached to them, but only core ideas, I decided it would be easier for me to keep track of and award badges by chapter.

Now, I feel like I need to make it clear that gamifying a class is not about badges.  It's just one element of the game and it happens to be the first game element I have physically worked on.  The theme is going to be "detective", Inspector Gadget style.  I had been thinking about basing it on the show CSI, but it seemed kind of gory for middle school, then I toyed with Nancy Drew.  I read one of the books, which did give me an idea of a game element to add, but I decided that I really don't like Nancy Drew! A couple of weeks later, our family watched the Inspector Gadget movie for movie night and a theme was born.

Just today, I finished designing the badges, one for each chapter.  The students will have a notebook with a divider for each unit.  The divider for the unit has spaces for a badge for each chapter. I decided to make the badges 1 1/4 inches, since from my scrap-booking days I had a circle punch that size.  I'll print them on card stock to make them sturdier and then send them through our Xyron sticker maker so students can stick them right in without having to deal with glue or tape. Students will earn the badge by successfully completing their Normal Case Load for that chapter.  Getting the gold star takes more than that, but more on that later...

I think my next project will be solidifying the Normal Case Load (regular weekly homework) and Special Cases. The special cases will give students a choice of projects to complete in each chapter to help them master the learning objectives--with several choices, they can pick the assignment that they feel will work best for them. Then I'll move onto item cards, that we will call "gadgets" that students can earn for working on soft skills that I think are important.

Here are the links to the badges and the unit dividers:

Badges

Unit 1 Divider

Unit 2 Divider

Unit 3 Divider

Unit 4 Divider

Unit 5 Divider