Shopping at Waitrose, schools and online games

Usually when I'm at the checkout in Waitrose in Sheffield I get one of those little green tokens that you put in one of the three charity boxes near the exit. You read the label on each box and then use the token to vote for the local charity that you think should get a donation. It's a nice idea - it's always interesting to see which box contains the most green tokens and I guess it's a very effective and very visible (and tactile) way of making the customer aware of Waitrose's support for the local community.

Thinking about the Waitrose green tokens got me thinking about how a similar idea might work in a school - an online system that motivates and rewards students with virtual tokens and then lets them vote for the charity they want the school to support. It's not a completely half-baked idea: schools already give out ‘merits' and ‘house points' and it ties in really nicely with computer games - like most kids, mine live in online world of ‘points', ‘badges' and ‘levels'. And try Googling ‘Gamification', it's a hot topic at the moment in the online education world.

The trick as always would be to keep the solution simple - you have to come up with a list of essential requirements for a solution that's so easy to use that even the busiest teacher will find a moment to log in, search for a student and make a reward. At the moment in my head the system might work like this:

1. Teachers and students get their own accounts. The school probably has to create the accounts - I suspect that student self-registration would create too many problems.
   
   
2. There's a short list of charities in the system that the school will donate money to. The students get to see this list (maybe they're involved in putting that list together though I think for simplicity's sake that's outside the scope of the online system).
   
   
3. There's a visible ‘pot' of money that the school donates and a chart that shows where previous donations have gone. Maybe there's a role for the Parents' Association here or perhaps local commercial sponsors add to the pot?
   
   
4. The system's got to be super easy to administer and teachers must be able to find students quickly. That probably rules out sorting students into groups or classes (it makes the system more complicated to use and it creates too much administration), instead students simply get ‘tagged' with class or group identifiers.
   
   
5. A teacher finds a student (search by ‘tag'), makes a quick note that describes the reason for the reward and then clicks the ‘reward' button. I'd probably keep it simple and make all rewards the same ‘value' - so the teacher doesn't choose how many points to give.
   
   
6. Students can see their own rewards when they log in - there's some kind of really nice game-inspired chart that shows how many rewards they've got. Maybe they even get to do some simple analysis, so they can see which subjects give them the most rewards and which subjects need a bit more effort. A system that uses SMS to let students know when they've got rewards is probably a technology step too far for most schools.
   
   
7. Students get virtual ‘badges' when they hit certain levels. A cool feature would be do some Facebook integration (similar to the Khan Academy) so that students can display their badges on their Facebook timelines (integrating a school system with Facebook is probably another tricky topic for some people).
   
   
8. The ‘virtual badge' is also the token that lets the student vote for their preferred charity. They get to pick from the charity list and cast their vote.
   
   
9. Students can optionally choose to share their progress/scores with their parents. It could be that the student types in a parent email address and the system sends out a nicely formatted email whenever the student gets a reward.
   
   
10. Everyone who uses the system sees a live running total of votes. You could get really clever and do charts that show how the votes change over time or even show how different age groups vote and which subjects give out the most rewards.
    
    

One of the doubts I have is about the amount that the school is willing to donate and whether that amount has to be above a certain size for the system to be credible to the students (could students win extra rewards by generating funds?). There's probably also an argument that says it's better to make the donations at the end of each term rather than at the end of each year. And the system is very dependant on the buy-in of the teachers.

On the other hand I've always thought there's a gap in the market for some simple online tools that bring school and home close together (particularly as children get older). I strongly suspect I have no more contact with my kids' schools than my parents had with mine 40 years ago (actually probably less contact because now both parents are at work full-time) and yet my kids and all their friends seem to be completely at home in an online world where it's quite normal to play online games with someone thousands of miles away.