I am not sure how I came across Classcraft, however, it completely changed the dynamic and engagement levels for my middle school students. Whilst there are many superb features, the one that your students are going to go dilly over, will be the powers they earn by getting XP or gold. This gets even better when you as the teacher put them in dedicated teams and have team events (tasks) that need to be completed.
This introduction video for students is what I shared after I setup the class.
Classcraft has a behaviour section, that you can modify to suit your students or alternatively have them come up with their own behaviour rewards to gain XP.
If students are not on task you can set this in the behaviour section too. As a class we came up with these together, it is not surprising that with this type of autonomy offered that my students are more engaged and helping not only regulate others but self-regulating their behaviour.
If you have a year-long course of teaching a class, I strongly recommend editing the Game Rules section, I initially used the default values and soon realised that if I did not make some edits that students would be levelling up too fast and too easily.
There many more wonderful features in Classcraft, the one I am making most use of at the moment is the Quest feature. With Quests you can immerse students in a VR adventure, create your own quests or import quests created by other educators. The best thing about quests is that you can have the entire quest self-paced, or you can make it so that the next section of the quest only opens when everyone has complete the first ‘waypoint’.
For those with an interest in research using Classcraft, here is a short excerpt
“An analysis of Classcraft with the Activity Theory framework illustrates that the game enables a shift of the actions performed by the students and not on the action themselves. Not limited to using game features in a mechanical way, Classcraft changes the classroom into an adventure where players have to overcome challenges in order to progress.
For three of the classes studied, social engagement, assessed through the use of collaborative powers, increases during the time dedicated to play. This study found that Classcraft has an influence on how students collaborate with their teammates and that the game reaches its objective of fostering social engagement.”
The full article is available here.