| I thought I'd be onboard from the first paragraph but then you took a hard turn into gamification. That seems like entirely too much overhead for a topic that already doesn't have enough time to teach the fundamentals properly. Not to mention that, at some point, you hit a wall of severe diminishing returns on promoting interest through gamification without enormous payoffs. People will either be engaged with the material or they won't. Your class/their grade is simply not high enough stakes for someone not interested in the material to slog through with that extra effort. What would happen is a couple folks who would have already been motivated will suggest their answer and the rest of the room will follow one of them. I like the 'pick and choose'-additive model you mentioned. It builds in extra credit along the way, too. 12 weekly assignments worth 5 pts apiece (say 1 question, 1 pt, they can be longer questions), 3 exams worth 20 points each. Of course, that is merely making explicit a fairly normal system where you just don't know the assignment counts or weights beforehand. But you could adjust it so that, instead of 12 homeworks, you can do a handful of projects that require deeper understanding. For people uninterested, just getting their credit, they can slog through the simple homework. For those motivated to learn the material more deeply, they can do the harder, deeper work (that hopefully takes less overall time - no need to punish them). |