Teams and collaboration

Teamwork and collaboration are core to the Classcraft experience for students. Playing with teams is a great way to get students to work together. Let’s see how they work and their benefits!

Learn more about: 

Using teams

Teams are a great way to motivate students to work together in order to strive as a group. While they’re entirely optional, your whole class could benefit from the extra motivation teams bring to the table.

After the Exploration phase, collaboration becomes more and more important, driving intrinsic motivation for students.

Collaborative powers

When students unlock their character classes, they gain access to some powers that are marked as collaborative. These special powers don’t actually benefit them: they benefit one of their teammates or even their whole team! 

Using a collaborative power to help another student succeed grants them Experience Points.

Learn more about collaborative powers here.   

Kudos

Students can send Kudos to one another but they can also send Kudos to whole teams. Way to highlight a team’s success!

Formative Reviews

When you run a Formative Review, also called a Boss Battle, you can select to challenge individual students (either random or specific, such as for a one on one review), or whole teams. When a team needs to answer a question, students work together to come up with the correct answer, face the consequences as a team if they have the wrong answer, and share the victory if they win the battle!

Random Events

When you set up Random Events, you can make them affect teams either by picking one student per team or by selecting whole teams at random.

Learn more about setting up Random Events here.

Random Picker

Just as you can use the Random Picker to select a student in your class, you can use it to select a random team to complete an activity or receive points.

Creating teams

To create teams in Classcraft…

  1. On your Class Dashboard, click the List view icon 
  2. Click Manage teams
  3. Click Add a team to create as many teams as you need
  4. Drag and drop students onto teams
  5. Click Done when you’re finished editing teams

You can also edit your teams directly from your class settings.

Consider asking students to come up with a unique team name and letting them select a crest from the list for extra buy-in.

While you’re encouraged to set teams in the Collaboration phase, you don’t have to make these teams final! You can modify them at any time during the school year. You could have different teams for every semester, or switch them out on special occasions.

Whenever you change teams, remember to balance your teams so that your students can still have a great Classcraft experience!

Balancing teams

While you can let students choose their own teams, as an educator, you might see the benefit of setting them yourself. Teams are a great collaboration tool and can teach students how to work with other students they normally would just not work with.

As such, we suggest creating teams with students of various social circles and backgrounds and with different academic strengths and weaknesses so students can forge bonds outside of their normal circles and learn to work with a vast array of different people.

Teams are unlocked at the same time as character classes. Don’t forget to consider your students’ character classes when you create teams. You’ll want to make sure that there is a Mage, Healer, and Guardian on every single team.

Playing without teams

While we encourage you to try teams, the final decision is totally up to you!

Classcraft can totally work in a setting where no teams are set up. In general, students will be considered as part of one single team called the Unassigned students. Here’s how things will work:

  • Any student in class will be able to use their game-based collaborative powers to help other students (such as Protect or Heal)
  • Formative Reviews, Random Events, and the Random Picker will consider students to be part of a single team (only one random team will ever come up)
  • Students will not be able to send Kudos to teams
  • No teammates will appear on the profile view of your students