My next gamification project was to take Clark Creative Education’s CSI Algebra 1 curriculum and make it an interactive experience in our learning management system, Canvas. Clint Clark has come up with some amazing ways to engage students with mysteries, boot camps, escape rooms, whodunnits, and more. His work is definitely worth checking out and worth the money. Check out his store on Teacher’s Pay Teachers.
I’ll give you a quick idea of the anatomy of the course, but since I only purchased a license for my students, it will be a generic look at the content.
Home Page
According to the description on TpT, “CSI: Algebra is a collection of nine different algebraically inspired mathematical puzzles with a little international pizazz. The nine puzzles intend to target specific Algebra 1 units and add a little flair to the ordinary challenge question.”
So, the home page had links to each of those nine units:
Each link then takes you to that unit of study. There is an introduction to the lesson in Clint’s creative story-telling way. I used a Voki for this introduction to give it some interactivity.
The six suspects are then introduced with their favorite numbers. More interactivity could be added here using Voki’s, but I just added the pictures.
Now, students are taken to the six lessons (scenes) in the unit of study and must work in order to collect their clues.
Each Scene, then takes you to a lesson which I created as a quiz. The students worked through the lesson and then entered their solution. They are given three attempts at each quiz. Then, once they have worked through each of the six lessons, they are ready to solve the puzzle. They go back to the unit home and click the link to “solve the puzzle” which takes them to another quiz. This was a multiple choice quiz with each suspect’s picture as an answer choice.
Finally, when students successfully completed the unit, they were taken to a congratulations page with another Voki.
They could then go back to the World Map and continue through the units of study.
While Clint’s lessons are already amazing, digitizing these made it more interactive and accessible to the students.