Boss Battles

S’abonner

Hi, everyone:

Boss Battles make reviewing for formative assessments fun and exciting. Free users can create one Boss Battle and Premium accounts can create as much as they'd like.

Feel free to ask any questions you have about Boss Battles!

- Mélysa Fréchette, Community Manager, support@classcraft.com 

108 commentaires
Date Votes

When random students are selected to play the Boss Battles how are the points awarded or taken? is it to the individual students? Is it to the whole class? 

I am also wondering if there is a way to choose specific students to do a boss battle. At the moment I am marking students absent who do not wish to join the battle, but it's an extra step to remember when getting started so I am hoping there will be an update to allow me to simply check the students who want to battle.

Thanks! Annette

Hi Annette,

There's a question bank, but not a boss battle bank, so it's not possible to store a completed battle. However, you can drag and drop battles to change their order: You could, for example, put the battles you've completed at the bottom of the list.

Annette, you can select a single student to do the battle, but not multiple students. I'll pass your comment along to the team, though!

Hi, Lavonda!

It depends on the option you chose for the "Select Opponent" screen. There are three options:

  • Class (everyone receives the reward if they are victorious)
  • Team (only the selected team receives the reward if victorious)
  • Student (only the student receives the reward if victorious)

 

If the person or the team who has to answer doesn't have the correct answer, only that person or team loses HP.

I hope that's clear!

Is there a way to import questions for a Boss Battle? Like a spreadsheet of some sort. It would be a great timesaver. 

Boss Battle Tip:

If you want students to have a chance to re-answer a question during a boss battle, you can set the boss battle to select individual students. If the student gets the question wrong, their teammates can help them before you show them the correct answer. Then, roll a dice (I use a D20, but you could use any dice or even just flip a coin). If the students get a certain result (11-20 on a D20, 4-6 on a regular die, or tails on a coin) then it counts as correct and does damage to the boss. If they get the opposite result, you count it as incorrect and they take damage.

Hi Meagan,

For the moment, it's not possible to import questions from a document.

At our school, high student engagement and cooperative learning is a big deal.  I would love to have the option, where a team could do a boss battle and it randomly selects students from that team.  This would also be great to function from an ipad. Trying to engage more students at the same time.  If one team out of 5 is called on in a Boss battle, then thats only 20% class engagement.  If I randomly select one student of 25 then i have on 2.5% class engagement.  options coming soon?

 

Hi, Michael!

Unless I misunderstand, part of what you're asking is already available: When launching a boss battle, there's the "Select Opponent" screen, and one of the option is "Team." Here's how it looks:

This makes it possible to pick a single team and have the game randomly select students from that team. It's not yet available on iPad though!

WOW, thanks.

 

I was happy to help! 😄

Following up on Meagan's comment about importing. If this is in development I would love to have to the following:

1. Some idea of a potential timeline. I realize this is always uncertain with development, but if it might be coming in the next 6 months I don't want to spend time developing a workaround that immediately becomes obsolete. However, if it's more than a year out then doing that work might be worthwhile.

2. Importing from a spreadsheet would be great. If that would allow be compatible with a QTI format that would be even better.

Other suggestions I like and would use right away in class:

1. 1:1 battles that students could do on their own
2. Students ability to challenge other students for XP
3. Ability to edit math equations and ideally also create formula type questions.

Also, regarding math equations. The best work around I have found so far it to create the equations as images and import them. If anyone else finds a better solution I would love to hear about that.

Hi, Kip!

We're aiming to make boss battle importing possible in 2017.

I would love to see students be able to do boss bottles on their own to gain AP/XP/GP points.  I wonder if every chapter you could have different quizzes be enabled and students could use those quizzes to defeat different bosses and earn points.  Then when the chapter is finished you could start again with different quizzes that relate to the new chapter.

This:

1. 1:1 battles that students could do on their own
2. Students ability to challenge other students for XP

With the new quest mode active now, it would be really cool if we could upload our own boss images. My students are chasing after an evil scientist named Gregor Collins! Let them taste the sweet vengeance they so crave.  That poor purple grumbler did nothing to them.   

Can you utilize boss battles in a quest?  I think this would be a great way to end a quest.

Quick question. Say for whatever reason the group wipes while fighting a boss (everyone is killed!).  What happens next?  What do you do in this situation? 

@ Derek Ruble: The challenge-idea was implemented by my students into the "powers" before starting. Warriors can challenge others, the demonic tutor and even subjugate other teams via powers, which is quite fun.

@Brian Johnson: Can you explain your question a little bit more, please? IMHO the obvious answer is that the normal mechanic applies to everyone. This means, normally, when a character dies, all teammembers recieve extra damage and - given that the dead character promises to fulfill his sentence - is simply resurrected. In this case you can skip the damage-step; they are all dead anyway ;) Just give each of them a sentence and ressurect them all. I mean, they deserve the punishment, don't they? They must have slacked a lot to fail so miserably.

Of course, you can feel free to write a whole story around it. For example, use the wheel of fortune to ressurrect only a few, give them extra tasks (sentence) to ressurect the next of their choosing, give the newly ressurrected their sentence to revive even more and so on.

And, last but not least: You can walk the opposite path and blame yourself for losing your students on the way of education and give them all a god-sent pardon.

I have never experienced that myself before. Please let me know how it turned out ^^

Vincent

Anne-Marie, thank you for taking the time to help me in chat today.  I would like to follow up on my question.  Incase you don't remember, I asked about whether boss battles could be assigned to whole class instead of random.  So to follow up that question, I'm wondering what the point of a boss battle is then?  If only part of the class gets to participate, how is that fun or engaging for the ones who aren't involved?  I saw earlier in this thread that people use it as a review?  I don't understand how thats possible since not everyone would be involved.  If you could help me understand the value of boss battles I would really appreciate it.  I'm enjoying Classcraft so far, but there are some limitations that, at least right now, don't make sense and would keep me from paying for premium.

 

Thanks!

Hi Matt,

although you specifically addressed Anne-Marie, maybe my answer to your question might be of some use for you or other users, since you posted it here. Your post includes two questions, which I will try to answer for myself in the same order.

  1. I use boss-battles for parts of the class most of the time. My main class consists of 3 teams with 6 students each. I have the opportunity to send parts of the class away (PC-room, library, playground, etc) for long tasks, which take around 90 min to 3 hours. During that time, I invite teams to boss battles. They cherish the opportunity to shine in front of their teammates, answering hard questions around the currect topic of that subject and helping each other gaining exp. I even used it as vocabulary test for the 17 year-olds in geography. With the new quest feature beginning to come to life, it will be NECESSARY to fight bosses alone or as a team, since the most important use of quests will be the individualized curriculum. The purpose of bosses will shift towards being a self-timed test, whether one has passed a chapter or not.
  2. You said, some things don't make sense yet. I couldn't agree more. So many things are completely adjustable (powers, behaviour etc...), but then again, you can't adjust pics, you can't adress damage values to bosses, you can't define automated clearance qualifiers for quests-parts etc... The reason I see for this is that classcraft is still in its baby-state of development. Some parts are ready and over-emphasized, like skins and menu-graphics. But most of the client is still growing. We all waited about 6 months for the noise-meter (!). Really now, my class asked me, whether the whole staff was on vacation for 6 months :))) Every single tiny game-developing company with such development speed would be bancrupt by now. Think about the huge amount of info e.g. Riot Games throws at their community about things that will be coming 2 years in the future. For this we have but a single post with a rough ETA date here :))

But then: I haven't found a good alternative yet. The way classcraft started things is exactly my line. For now, I hope that this will be my tool to work with in the years to come. So I pay for premium to support (=speed-up ^ ^) their work and be always familiar with the parts of my tool. The choice is all yours though, naturally :)

Have fun!

Vincent

Hey!

Thanks for the feedback. We know the release of the volume meter took longer than anticipated. Thankfully, our dev team has grown in size this summer, and you can expect developments to go faster in the future.

Hi Matt,

You can do boss battles with any size group (class, student group, or individuals).  When you go to "play" the boss battle, it will ask you how you want to set up the "fight." (See image below) From here, you can select to battle as a class, just one team, or an individual. The class can battle as individual students (where one student at a time answers the question; if they are wrong, only they take damage) or the whole class in teams (a team answers the question; if they are wrong, the whole team takes damage). The team option will cycle through the individual students on a team, just like the individual students in a class battle.The student option will have just one student assigned to the battle and will be responsible for all answering.

I hope this clears somethings up!

The way I use the boss battles is for review. However, I give every student a printout with all the questions that are going to be asked during the battle. (Now, my biggest class is 17 and smallest is 4, so my experience may differ from others). I have the battle always go through all students. When it's a particular student's turn, he/she will work out the problem given and provide the answer. The students who are not currently being asked the question on the board are supposed to continue working through the rest of the questions on the review. That also allows some to get help from a classmate or look up info in their notes or ask me for clarification while another student is working the current problem. My classes are only 40 minutes so it does help when it comes to a student who had the answer worked out previously and can just say it rather than spending a few minutes working. I don't like to give them a time limit per question because I have several students who have extreme anxiety about that sort of thing and since math class puts most students on high stress I try not to add to it.

I'm new to this too, but this is the system that has worked best for me so far.

The only issue I've run into is the critical hits/misses. I had a Boss Battle today where the class answered every single question correctly, but the misses were generated waaaay more often than the critical hits. After they answered the last question, the boss still had 5 HP so they were not successful in defeating him. I went in and manually gave them the XP and GP they were supposed to receive, but I thought that was a little unfair. I know I'm probably not great at balancing my games yet, but I don't want to make it TOO easy to beat the boss. I mean they don't do all the questions if the boss is defeated early on. I realize you can check the box to turn off critical hits/misses, but I think they add to the fun and are more like actual RPG games. I don't know if I just hit a weird bug today or what, but it was pretty unbalanced as far as that goes.

First let me say that my class really enjoys playing, and remind me very quickly if I forget to do a random event to start the class.  So I appreciate all the hard work that has gone into creating this and I don't want to come off ungrateful.  I'm just trying to figure out what features I'm going to use, and which ones I won't before I decide to invest my own money into making my account premium.  Thankfully a trial is offered so I can try all this out.

 

Jared, I've tried several times to set this up to be more than 1 team or more than 1 player.  When I set up a boss battle I can choose random, or I can pick 1 team or 1 player.  My smallest class is 22 and my biggest is 34.  I don't have time to go through and set up a "random" battle 34 times for each of my classes.  I'm also not going to have a boss battle with the vast majority of my class is sitting on their hands doing nothing and being jealous because they're team wasn't picked.  This is just asking for behavior issues and doesn't promote the team work I was hoping to get from Classcraft.  

 

Unless this changes, or I'm not seeing how to select the whole class (Something I was told in the help chat is NOT possible) Boss Battles are worthless in my class and not a feature I'll ever use, which is sad because I see a LOT of value in it.

Hi Matt,

I'm not sure if I misunderstood you – I thought you didn't want a specific student or team chosen but wanted each question to be open to the whole class.

On the screen Jared mentioned, selecting "Students" will select a different student for each question, while selecting "Teams" will select a different team for each question. In those cases, students can't really sit on their hands because they can get called on at any time.

I'm not sure where' we're not understanding each other, that's the problem with written vs spoken communication I guess.  So even on the screen shot you posted it says "Random" . There is no way to actually select each team and have a boss battle be a full class activity.  You do have the option to select the players or teams manually, so perhaps I could go in and over and over select teams to participate until I have the whole class, but that would take forever.  

 

When I select "Class" then "Students" or "Teams" it only gives me the option to start the battle, not assign questions to individuals.  But again, if this is to be used as a review, how is each team doing 1 or 2 questions out of the whole thing valuable?  I'm not trying to be difficult or anything, I'm really trying to figure out how to best use Classcraft in my room because it really has had a positive influence on behaviors so if I could use it even more, that would be even better.

 

Thanks!

@Matt Champeny

It's random students. Each time you go to a new question, a different student is randomly generated until you either finish all the questions or defeat the boss. Depending on the amount of students/questions some students would be called more than once. I don't think it picks students twice until after it's gone through everyone else.

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