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

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.

@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.

@Matt

I'm trying to upload more pictures...

 

Maybe just this folder will work:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxxV-uw__l1RTHVuU1MtVFJlNW8?usp=sharing 

Those are images from a battle I used with my students. I chose "random students" and it chose one student for the first one and then a different student for the second one.

As I said previously, I have the rest of the students continuing to work out the rest of the questions that might come up.

I think that's a great idea, Jared!

I played a Boss Battle on Friday in my classes, and after they defeated the Tiny Krakus, they earned double the XP than I had set (set it for 500 XP, but they earned 1000)  This happened in 3 of my 4 classes.  Was there a glitch that caused this?  I tried looking in my settings to see if there was a "double the XP if no questions were missed" but I didn't see anything like that. 

Hi Jess,

A "flawless victory" (no questions missed) does pay double the points!

It would be great to be able to pull in already created quizzes from sites like quizzlet, or to be able to share them like quests. 

Also looking forward to individualized boss fights.

Hi, everyone!

We don't have an ETA for self-correcting quizzes at the moment. Thanks for your patience!

Hi would it be possible that only certain students or teams selected by the teacher, were able to fight a monster? Instead of random ones.

So has anyone noticed the "Insert Equation" option yet? I found it today and have been playing with it a little.

 

One thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to make exponents for more than one number, so like: 4^(x+3)

I want x+3 to be the exponent, not just the x. Any thoughts?

Ooh, figured it out.

4^{x+3}

Curly braces for the win!

WOW! That cheat sheet is intense. But I don't see where it tells me how to do the most useful things as a chemistry teacher I would want to do.

For those interested, SUBSCRIPTS are preceded by the underscore _ and SUPERSCRIPTS are preceded by ^

Hope this helps some others.

Oh, and thanks, Allison, for pointing it out!

I have a request, the equations on the question is great. However for simplifying equations in Mathematics, the answer is also in equation form and I am unable to fill in an equation in the answer, only the question. Can this be fixed or am I missing something?

Hi Dan,

Equations in the answer section of the Boss Battles is not something that is currently supported. Rest assured that we will be taking our community's interest into consideration for future releases. 

I am getting ready to present a PD on Classcraft and want to be sure that I have my facts straight. Boss Battle is ONLY available for premium right? I have premium and can't remember if I could access it or not when I didn't...for some reason, I feel like I could do like one battle in the free version but I'm not sure. I want to be sure that I'm giving correct information to the teachers in the PD. Thanks!!

Exactly! The Boss Battles are part of the Premium package. Here is a page from our knowledge center explaining everything the Premium package offers to help you present Classcraft in your PD session :) : https://help.classcraft.com/hc/en-us/articles/223833508-Lesson-5-Classcraft-Premium-features-3-mins-

Is there a way to make Boss Battles self-grading so that students can work on them independently for review, at their own pace?

Hey, Samantha! 

For the time being, students can work at their own pace through Quests, by activating the Self-Paced Progress option. The Boss Battles are primarily for formative review, done verbally as a group. I hope that makes sense! 

Let me know if you need more info. :-)

I've noticed that it is possible to share boss battles now.  Is there a forum for sharing them?

Thanks for sharing that link, Nicholas! 

 

You understood correctly! You can now share Boss Battles with other teachers!

Enjoy! :)

I've returned to this forum with a suggestion or two for boss battles. Forgive my inane ramblings.

1) The option for another team to "steal" a chance. I do a lot of team-based battles (the kids rely on one another a lot). Right now, the only option when the question presents is "REVEAL ANSWER" -- could there be another option where a team "assists" (instead of steals, maybe) and it picks another team to answer that particular question? Perhaps the monster does half damage to the first team or something.

2) A TIMER in boss battles. Some of my groups take way too long to respond. Perhaps a timer to help or the monster attacks. That, or the faster you attack, the more damage you do. For instance, given a 60 second timer, and a question worth 5 HP, you have 12 seconds before the damage reduces to 4 HP, then 12 more seconds before it reduces to 3 HP. Likewise, the monster's damage is inversely "building up"

 

I don't know. I have a lot of ideas for boss battles and I love them. I just want to see more features that allow them to do more. The kids beg and ask me each week, "Are we doing a boss battle today?" They look forward to them and the chance to use their powers and gain extra XP and GP.

Ahoy Nicholas,

These are very interesting suggestions! I will transfer them to our team for review and, who knows, you might see them in Classcraft in the future!

Farewell me fellow pirate, I love yer profile picture!

One option for another student helping is to actually make that one of their powers.  For ease of use, maybe make it cost 0AP but only usable once a day.  If they answer it right, give them manual rewards at the end... just a thought.

Doing time-sensitive damage would be a cool option.  I could see some students getting upset because I didn't click fast enough when they respond... Maybe something to work into self-test quizzes when they launch?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Jared!

 

 

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