Gamification with Digital Badges

Badging in the Classroom

Badges can represent a variety of accomplishments, from meeting success criteria toward unit learning outcomes, or even for reaching mastery on each unit.

Badges allow:

• teachers to visually track student progress towards course learning intentions.
• students to visually track their own progress through a course
• students to automatically earn badges upon successful completion of pre-determined criteria.

For a class with a strong community foundation, leaderboards are a great way to let students follow along with each other's progress as they earn badges in a course. Leaderboards can show student names, like the example below, or be anonymous.

Using Badges in Your Class

Badges can be embedded in Canvas using the Badgr LTI, so that students earn badges upon completion of module requirements, or you can keep track of badges earned in Badgr directly by using their website Links to an external site..

One of the most popular ways to implement gamification in the classroom is through the use of digital badges, or indicators of student mastery of certain skills, concepts, etc.

Below are examples of some badges that could extend the gamification of the Earth Science teacher's unit on earthquakes introduced in the video above, each representing a set of content area skills they need to develop in order to be successful on the final exam: