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Tag: badges

  • The Game of Education

    Controversial blogger Donald Clark has boldly announced that “Gamification does NOT work” in education. What he misses is that education has been gamified for the last 1400 years. Here is how that game works, and how we can…

  • Our first-ever 8th Dan student

    Meet Beatrice Wongsanguan, Y11 student at Patana School in Bangkok. Beatrice is the first student ever to achieve the 8th Dan belt in Yacapaca. In case you do not know, we copied the Judo belt scheme to describe our levels. Students earn White Belt almost immediately, the work up through the colours to Black Belt. After that,…

  • A very short primer on gamification

    Yacapaca is a gamified formative assessment system. I want to discuss briefly what that means, and how we interpret it in software. Gamification is the art of making things you want to do anyway more fun, and more motivating. To understand why this is so powerful, I recommend this 12-minute TED talk by Seth Priebatsch because it…

  • This is the power of a little tin badge

    I got this email yesterday from Dr. Mandy Heddle, who teaches in a high-achieving British International School. I have permission to share the story, but I’ll not name the school so as to stay out of their Google searches. I wanted to share with you that I have a student I have mentored since she was 11…

  • The Badge Log

    If your students have enjoyed earning Yacapaca badges, you may need to track exactly who has earned what. There is now a badge log under the More tab. Nothing fancy, but it should meet the need. See yours here. Badges have been a runaway success this year, with overwhelmingly positive feedback (such as this story…