According to Wikipedia, gamification is “the use of techniques, elements and dynamics from games and leisure activities in non-recreational contexts in order to boost motivation and reinforce behaviour to solve a problem or achieve a goal.”
All of us who spend time around children, whether as parents or tutors, know how much they enjoy play. A few years ago educators began to use elements from games such as rules, rewards and competition in education. The goal was both to improve academic outcomes and to encourage certain behaviours. That, in essence, is gamification.
What is Class Dojo?
Class Dojo is a free application that works both on the web and on mobile devices across platforms, helping us implement a gamification strategy.
The idea behind Class Dojo is to help monitor students’ progress in the areas we want to improve.
How does it work?
Class Dojo is structured on several levels:
- School
- Class
- Group
- Student
It also includes several user roles:
- Head teacher
- Teacher
- Student
- Parent
This structure allows a lot of flexibility while keeping everything organised and under control. A student can belong to a group, that group belongs to a class and that class belongs to a school. The head teacher can see how classes are doing, teachers can manage their classes and parents can follow their children’s progress.
To achieve the gamification goals we mentioned at the beginning, we need to define the behaviours we want to reward and those we want to discourage. For example, in a specific class we might reward:
- Group work
- Creativity
- Kindness toward classmates
- Taking care of school materials
And the attitudes we want to avoid could be:
- Swearing
- Talking in class
- Hitting classmates
- Running in the corridors
Each class can define different goals.
We can assign a positive or negative value to each of these attitudes and behaviours. Those scores can be shared with students so that, almost like a game, they can see their progress and become more aware of what they are doing well or badly.
In short, it is about using everything children find engaging in games to improve their attitudes, behaviour and abilities.
What can Class Dojo be used for?
Beyond rewarding or penalising attitudes, Class Dojo also allows you to:
- Track student attendance.
- Use a timer to manage certain activities.
- Create a class diary to note the milestones a teacher considers important in the day-to-day life of the class.
- Create a student portfolio to record progress, even allowing the student to write in it so they become part of the process.
- Maintain direct communication with parents, sharing scores and the student diary so they have a clearer view of progress, or informing them of any incidents directly.
Ultimately, Class Dojo is a teaching aid that each head teacher, teacher, student or parent can personalise and adapt to their own understanding of education.
If you want to know a little more about the tool, here are some useful links:
Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.
Steve Jobs
This is a sentence we have heard a lot lately, but why does programming teach you how to think?
Because programming forces you to frame a problem and organise a plan to solve it, which means anticipating situations and preparing for different scenarios. That is programming.
But is that enough to say that everybody should learn to code?
Let us look at what is happening in other countries:
- By unanimous decision, the Public School Board of Education in the Chicago district, the third largest in the United States, made computer science a mandatory subject required for high-school graduation.
- President Barack Obama set aside four billion dollars to expand computer science education across schools, through alliances such as Code.org.
- The United Kingdom introduced computer science into the educational curriculum in January 2013.
It clearly matters, and many governments are moving in that direction. But honestly, it does not sound like the most entertaining thing in the world, or maybe it does.
In reality, programming is much more than knowing how to think or preparing for future jobs. Programming, surprisingly for some people, is also a lot of fun and among other things it allows you to turn your own ideas or projects into reality. Today, and even more in the future, almost everything will run on software, which means on programs created by programmers.
To encourage this passion for programming, the Hour of Code was created. It is a global campaign that encourages boys and girls to spend one hour playing, learning and creating with technology so that they themselves discover coding through play.
This video about the campaign in Argentina helps explain it better:
Finally, if you decide to start programming, these 8 tips taken from this article in English may be useful:
- Choose a project.
- Break it into smaller pieces.
- Do one thing at a time.
- Ask others for help.
- Search the internet whenever you run into a problem.
- Do not panic when something does not work the first time.
- Follow a strict schedule.
- Be patient.
And do not forget it: programming helps you think, it matters for your future, and it is fun.
