Accidental Gamification aka A Flipped Model that Finally Worked for Me

My 9th grade Geometry students are sitting in front of me, taking their assessment on right triangle trigonometry. I am confident that they are well prepared for the assessment and I feel satisfied because the work they did to learn the material was both rigorous, engaging and fun.

My colleague, Mike, and I have for several years spent most of the 2nd semester running flipped classrooms. I tried a flipped unit for the first time back in 2009. Students watch a video, made by myself and colleague Garrett, that teaches them a new concept. They take notes on a handout and in theory, pause the video from time to time to do practice problems to self assess.

I liked it because during class, students could get immediate feedback from their classmates or myself on tough problems. What it lacked was meaningful whole class discussions as students worked at different paces. Also, it was boring. This was my fault. I just handed them problem sets and walked around. I didn't take the opportunity to claim the extra class time for PrBL or discovery.

Cut to 2015 - Colleague Mike went to a conference, came back and said... Can we find a better to make our Flipped Classroom more engaging?

We worked together to design a better way to use the class time. I am calling it accidental gamification as we didn't set out to track badges - we just wanted to make class better. I divided each class into teams. We did a combination of games and discovery. There was only one formal, paper assignment. I tracked winners with low tech badges - I stamped posters with chickens or tigers, the value of which was determined on the fly. In the future, I would like to explore using a spreadsheet to track badges, as Alice Keeler writes about here.

Students playing The Game

Each day we used a series of problems to use for White Board Stamp Game. These were the easier, faster to calculate problems from homework (see the presentation below for all the problems). I give a certain amount of time for students to work out problems on white boards, showing work. I call for boards up and use a spinner app on my phone to choose a seat number to call from each team. Kids can help each other, but there isn't enough time generally if a kid struggles a lot on the attack. 

The harder problems were used for Team Challenges, in which students worked in their teams collaboratively with just one white board per team. They were required to provide thorough, justified solutions. I randomly made a few of these Tiger Challenges (because I have a tiger stamp).


The Game: Winning team gets 2 chickens, 2nd place gets 1 chicken
Team challenge: Winning team gets 3 chicken and 2nd place gets 2 chickens
Tiger Challenge: Winning team gets 1 Tiger Stamp (worth 4 chickens), 2nd place gets 3 chickens

Take a look at my daily lesson notes and materials. Warning: my videos contain a couple of mistakes and a lot of my silliness.

Day 1: Understanding the Ratios
Last Night the students watched Lesson 9.9 - Introduction to Trig.

1. Set up Teams
2. Trig discovery "Lab" -Each team was assigned the same angle and they compared trig values. We discussed the link to similar triangles and compared their values to a trig table as a group. I didn't dedicate enough time to have each team do two different triangles or for them to reflect on the activity via their blogs. I have seen other teachers make this activity a bit better by using a shared spreadsheet to gather the trig values. I like Dan's approach too.
3. 10 rounds of the game
4. Team Challenge #1

Ss working on Trig Discovery

Day 2: Finding missing lengths
Last night students watched Lesson 9.10#1: Trig Ratios
1. 6 -7 rounds of The Game
2. Team challenge #2,
3. Tiger Challenge: Trig Pile Up

I am worried that teams are unbalanced as two teams have yet to score in each class. Students are happy though and I can redistribute teams next time. 

Hard at work on the Pile Up.

Ss working on a Team challenge.

Day 3: Taking it Up a Notch
Last night students watch Lesson 9.10 #2: Trig Rations Again
1. 6 rounds of The Game
2. Team Challenge #3
3. Tiger challenge - Polygon Problem - a 3 Act I made of my 4 year old playing with his metro mags

We also considered a Trig Scavenger Hunt, a clinometer activity based on How High is the Ceiling from Amy or Sofa Away from Me (Mathaliscious) for this day.

Day 4: Get Students Creating
Last Night Students watched Lesson: Trig Review
1. A few rounds of the game
2. Make own Trig Pile - Check out the prompt here. My students have math blogs and this was a great activity that could go on their blogs (check out sample below).

We also considered the bat and the diamond building via Lisa for this day.

Strauss's Blog

Day 5: Review
1. 6 or so rounds the Game
2.Team Challenge #4
3. 1 Tiger Challenge

Actual homework on paper assigned this day. Kids were excited and eager as a total of 7 chickens were up for grabs.

Winners will get candy.

Final Tally from 3rd Period

Final Tally from Period 4

Agenda on the last day.

Day 6: Assessment
I haven't graded them yet but no tears or heavy sighs. 

Reflection:
In the beginning I was a little worried that they wouldn't learn as much if they didn't do the homework on paper. I was wrong. My students were more likely to watch the videos because they didn't want to let their team down. They were engaged for every minute of class time. They had fun. They begged me to do it for the rest of the year. I heard a lot of "I love this" and "I want a chicken!"

I plan on doing this in some form for the remainder of the year. I feel like I started the year with a lot of boring days in Geometry. Perhaps finishing strong will redeem a slow start. :


Things I want to improve or change: 
Teams weren't quite balanced
We didn't do any Geogebra! 
Didn't do much web exploration from Math Open Ref like this or this.
No time to get outside and use the clinometer to measure tall things.