Gamification In Motion

Fast forward to the middle of my senior year. I followed up with Ryan Prestel (CEO of JadeTrack) and was able to to check out their office and learn more about sustainability, as well as grasp a better understanding of how JadeTrack helps businesses. During my “shadowing” Ryan mentioned gamification, a term completely foreign to me. At first thought I was wondering if there was a new iPhone app I had missed, or it was some new term for playing a video game. Ryan proceeded to explain to me how gamification is a framework that can engage various groups of people by creating a game or a system of rewards to achieve objectives and spread awareness of a topic – not exactly an app or a game but similar (or at least I made myself feel better thinking I wasn’t too far off). Moreover, he explained how sustainability is one of those topics that is frequently being gamified, and could work well in a school setting. With that I saw an opportunity in my own school. I knew this had the potential to generate awareness and interest for the topic of sustainability and what good it can do. This was the opportunity for students to have their eyes opened to sustainability, much like I had experienced my Junior year in APES.
With the help of Ryan and the power of JadeTrack, Mr. Chuck Crawford (Dublin Jerome High School) and I were able to create a sustainability challenge and introduce gamification to Jerome’s AP Environmental students. We created a framework that allowed the AP Environmental classes to compete against each other to determine which class was the most sustainable.
For the sustainability challenge students were given the task of creating and submitting a short video and a description, which in turn would be scored using a rubric (posted at the bottom of the page). It was completely up to the students as to what they covered in their video as long as it fell under the umbrella of sustainability – which many students came to realize was a huge umbrella. Students could identify something they deemed as an inefficiency, or they could take action to an already existing inefficiency. As well, students were merited points for tracking the results of their actions measured against current JadeTrack data or by other means. Lastly, students who are outside of the box thinkers could earn points for innovative sustainable thinking (i.e. a student made a video tutorial on turning school milk cartons into wallets). Also, students were given more points if their video covered a broader scale (i.e. something in their classroom vs. something in the district). Once the students recorded their video, they were to submit it to the Dublin City Schools server, which all Dublin students have access to. Each student’s points went towards their classes total points. The class with the most points was deemed sustainability champion and rewarded with a pizza lunch.
It was truly amazing to see all the different routes students took in making a video about sustainability and the overall awareness the game was able to generate. When students watched other students it was really cool to see their reactions of “why didn’t I think of that?” and really open their eyes to the different ways of thinking about sustainability. What was even better was to see the students who weren’t involved in the challenge ask about the challenge and take an interest in what was going on. Although the project had good results, there were a few lessons learned as well. For example, creating more “hype” for the challenge would allow the students to hit the ground running right away, instead of taking a few days to understand the project. As a next step, the game could be expanded to schools versus schools, instead of the APES classes competing against each other. In summary, the goal of the challenge was to introduce the concept of sustainability through gamification and create a fun learning environment where students learn from students! I can’t wait to see what more can come of gamification with the help of JadeTrack.
Sustainability Challenge Scoring Rubric: