Classcraft
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Introducing Classcraft!
Overview for Parents: What is Classcraft?
Classcraft is an in-class game designed to encourage teamwork, boost participation, and increase motivation in a learning environment. Your child is about to embark on an adventure that will change how he/she thinks about school — without ever leaving the classroom. That journey is with Classcraft, a role-playing game featuring mages, warriors, and healers that teachers and students play together.
This is no ordinary game. Students will still be learning all their normal lessons. What will change is how they connect with what they’re studying. Classcraft works as a layer over a regular class structure. Students create characters that can learn special powers and level up, and how they perform in the classroom is directly tied to whether their characters and teammates survive and thrive.
Students aren’t playing a virtual game like Minecraft or World of Warcraft. While Classcraft is inspired by those games and is browser-based, it instead turns the offline, classroom experience into the adventure. Students learn to help their peers, thereby helping their teammates in the game. They learn to participate and engage with what they’re learning — math, physics, language arts, social studies, anything — so that they can power up their character. And they’ll learn that what’s disruptive and negative behavior in class is also detrimental to their character’s success in the game, and even detrimental to the success of their peers.
With a little time, we all should see a positive change in attitude and grade performance — real, meaningful, long-lasting benefits. Rather than a chore, math class can be fun!
How Classcraft Works:
Students create characters (healers, mages, or warriors) that gain or lose Health Points (to survive in the game), Action Points (to use powers), Experience Points (to level up), and Gold Pieces (to purchase gear in-game to customize their character).
Students are rewarded in the game when they perform well during class, such as receiving +60 Experience Points for correctly answering a question and +80 Experience points for completing homework.
When a student performs poorly, their character loses Health Points, which brings him/her closer to a real-world consequence, and that motivates him/her to improve. For example, a student loses 20 Health Points for not having homework sufficiently complete. If a student loses too many Health Points, he/she receives a "sentence", such as completing 15 minutes of relevant practice on IXL, attending a tutoring session, or writing his/her parents a letter about what events and behaviors caused him/her to "fall in battle" .
Students do better in the game when they work together in class, forming positive relationships and learning the value of teamwork. In turn, as students do what's needed to do better in the game, they do better in class.
Students can teach their characters “powers” that often have real-life benefits, such as extended time on homework assignments or the ability to listen to music during independent work time.
When a character loses all his/her health, it’s up to fellow students to help bring him/her back to life! Real-world interdependence!
The better students do in class and on tests and quizzes, the better their characters do in the game. More importantly, as they do what's needed to succeed in the game, they naturally do what's needed to understand math better! It’s a win-win!