Last week I decided to turn my classroom into a real life game, apps and all... kind of.
Last week I started using classcraft.com as my classroom management system. Most teachers use a colored card system to manage classroom behavior in younger grades and I have seen economic based ones for the older grades. ClassCraft is perfect for middle school since they all play online games and this one looks just like the others including a pretty cool app.
The way Classcraft works is that every student gets to pick a character, Warrior - Healer - Mage, and they are put in a team. I use my already created lab groups as their teams. Every character has HP (Health Points), AP (Action Points), XP (Experience Points) and GP (Gold). When they do something good in class they get XP to level up. With every Level they gain new powers which use AP. And of course GP is used to buy new armor and stuff, just for looks, for their avatar.
Warriors start with 80 HP and have menial Powers, such as "Hunting" which allows them to bring in a snack for the day. Warriors are for students who know they are going are going to talk out losing a decent amount of HP.
Healers have 50 HP and have decent powers, most importantly they can heal their team members.
Mages have a low HP, 30, but have some cool powers like leaving class, extra days to complete work, etc.
Every day the class starts with a random event. These can be as simple as everyone, or specific character classes, gaining XP or loosing HP to having a student sing a song for XP. If a student falls (looses all HP) they get a detention and all other team members loose 10 HP. This encourages the team to use their powers to help each other and promote communication and teamwork. Many think that getting a detention is harsh, but if you think about it most of them would have got one for talking multiple times in other classes instead of loosing 8HP.
If you want to know more about it here is the site http://www.classcraft.com and here is a link to the full rules for my classroom explaining the specific powers, XP gain and most importantly HP losses.