From today, your students will be able to earn new lapel badges on Yacapaca – if they work hard enough. We had a fantastic response to the original badge system. I was amazed and delighted to hear about schools building entire assemblies around the presentation of Yacapaca badges, so of course that motivated me to extend the system.
As students progress through Yacapaca, they earn “judo belt” avatars. Students get very competitive about who has the highest-level belt! Now they can additionally get lapel badges to show off their level to their family and friends. We post each badge to you so that you control how/when to present it to the student. There is no charge for this, even if your school does not have a paid subscription.
The avatar system is entirely separate from quiz scores that you use for grading. It is designed to reward persistence, diligence and effort, rather than ability.
When presenting, please remember that different badges require radically different amounts of effort to earn. The badge levels are
- White
- Yellow
- Orange
- Green
- Blue
- Brown
- Black 1st Dan (1 red stripe)
… to…
16. Black 10th Dan (10 red stripes)
The belts get progressively harder to earn as you go up the levels. To date, exactly 4 students (out of 3,000,000 accounts) have reached Black Belt 6th Dan, and no-one has got higher than that.
I am in the process of commissioning a poster for your ICT suite to promote the new badges and motivate students to work harder towards them. If you would like to get early access to a printable version, you can sign up for early download here.
Yacapaca 