Boss Battles and Quizes

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Alright, Boss Battles are a great way to gameify class review, but I am in desperate need of a similar function that can deliver an entire quiz to all the students simultaneously.   My method of delivering quizzes (via a class clicker system) is rapidly deteriorating and this is a great moment to transition to letting the students take my summative assessments via classcraft.   What are my options/what are the plans to expand in that direction?

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I just developed a strategy which is to give all students a handout with the boss battle questions. They do this as a traditional worksheet, but I frame it as Battle Preparation. This helps when we do the boss battle for two reasons:

  1. It helps insure that all students have answered all the review questions.
  2. It helps speed up the pace of a boss battle so that it doesn't have to take as long.

I've attached an image from my "battle prep" document for my first major unit as a reference. 

 

 Hi Mr. Vail,

You can set the boss battle to only do one team when you are starting the battle. After you pick your "battle," you will be given the option to select who will battle the monster. You can select the whole class (default), a specific (or random) team, or an individual student. I've attached a screenshot.  I hope this helps!

I would do back flips to be able to use Boss battles in a fashion similar to a clicker response system, or a quizizz type set up. I love them as review, but only a few number of students are engaged at a time, and that makes them less than ideal. Having the ability for each team or individual to answer each question (and work towards the rewards as a team or individual) would transform the effectiveness of Boss Battles. This would ensure that every student is focused on the battle at all times, and would provide me with more detailed formative feedback. 

Hi Nickie,

I remember having fun full-class quizzes like this when I was in high school. I'd love to share what made them so great and how you could maybe try and incorporate that into your classes with the help of Classcraft and Boss battles.

The spelling quiz would consist of the teacher reading out a text slowly while having us write it down on paper. Once that was over, she would choose students 1-by-1 in, in order, to read out how they spelt the next word in the text. If they spelt the word correctly, she would quickly go over why and mention any special details about the word. If they spelt it incorrectly, she would explain why it was incorrect, give the correct word and again, gave us any relevant details or things to look out for when using that word. 

Once every student had 2-3 turns to talk, the quiz would be over. What this did is have us:

1) Try out the quiz for ourselves first.

2) Share what we tried. 

3) Learn from our mistakes. If we did make a mistake spelling the word, we knew we were not alone and that many other students had the same mistake and also learned from it. 

4) In order to keep students focused on everyone's answers, she would allow us to "correct" or change our answers as we were getting the right answers with her. That made everyone pay attention since obviously, that meant everyone could have a really good grade! 

 

What we didn't know is that even if we did get a better grade, the whole quiz counted for so little that at the end of the day, it didn't really matter if everyone got 90+ %. The whole point of this exercise or quiz, was to get us ready for the exam, which it did really well! 

Now, here's how I'd implement that using Classcraft. Have them do a quiz on paper before the Boss Battle. Once the BB starts, they each get to answer 1-2 questions from the BB. Then, as the Boss Battle progresses, you point out the correct answers and explain each one, allowing them to change their answers, making sure they're following along. At the end of the BB, collect the quizzes and do a bit of good old-fashioned grading! You should find the average to be quite higher, but again, that's no problem since the whole thing can be worth like 4-5% of the final grade. These would basically count more towards participation points, but would actually lead to more learning and better grades for your students on exams at the end of the day!

I hope this helps!

 

 

I am equally interested in this function. I would really enjoy being able to have an exit quiz that would allow me to do a quick individual formative assessment prior to students moving to the next designation. This would better promote individualized learning as well as team work. Exciting awaiting further developments.

Hi Justin and Christa,

Updating Boss Battles is on our roadmap, but not in the near future. We're always looking for feedback, so thank you both for your comments.

And thanks for your patience!

Hello! My students asked me about the possibility of assigning Boss Battles as homework.  Is it possible to do that?

I would also love to have the feature where I can do a boss battle with just one group.  Preferably with the ability to select who that group is.  I feel running the boss battle with the whole class is fun but I lose a lot of students along the way and would love to be able to do smaller group battles with students of my choice.  Sort of like a min-boss battle that can lead up to the big boss at the end.

why not plickers or kahoot?  if anyone has iphone/ipad accessibility at their schools I think this would be the best way to do it.  Ive been starting with boss battles and quests finally and I think if you were to select the not random order option to the questions you could use kahoot at the same time to let the whole class take the quiz.  Plickers seems easy but it doesnt allow a student to take a quiz in their own orderly fashion but you can easily collect everyones answers individually to multiple choice questions.  Anybody ever impement this??/

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