Tuesday 24 June 2014

Producing levelling using Moodle

I thought I'd tackle the tricky subject of levelling next. Levels are an integral part of a number of games now, they are a useful way of allowing students to chart their own progress throughout the game and add an incentive element, especially if levelling up grants the students perks.

I also wanted a way of giving the students a visual identification of their current level. This will change as the student levels up, and should allow different students to see different levels when they log on. In other words, student A who is on level 3 should have a different visualisation of this to student B who is on level 2.

Initially I doubted this would be possible using Moodle, however thanks to a great deal of advice, I found it was indeed possible, so here's how I did it.

In the very first section of the Moodle page I created a checklist. I made it invisible to students, and also that I was the only person who had access and could check items on the list. I made as many items on the list as there were levels, simple called level 1, level 2 ... Level 11.



I also gave the checklist a score out of 100. This would mean that checking 1 box would complete about 9% of the total, checking 2 boxes about 18% and so on.

I then made 11 banners each with the name of a different level and species on it. These banners were then made into 11 labels using Moodle.

Finally I used conditional release on each of the labels to only show 1 label at a time. Label 1 would only be visible to a student if the value of the checklist 'Levels' was between 8-10%. Label 2 would only be visible to students if the value of checklist 'Levels' was between 17-20% and so on. I also set each of the labels to be totally invisible otherwise.

Thus if I had checked 2 boxes on the levels checklist for a particular student, they would have completed about 18% of that checklist and only the level 2 banner would be visible to a student when they log on.

I wanted to have control over this and not have students level automatically because i also want the students to complete an additional task before they are allowed to level up. This will be a research task based on the species that denotes their current level.

I realise i made a mistake organising this, as I could simply have level 1 being displayed if levels was 0%, this would have meant that the remaining 10 levels would equate to 10% each. Maybe I'll correct that, but the system I have works so I probably won't.

So that's how I organised the levelling during the game, please feel free to comment.

2 comments:

  1. I did the same with a checklist to unlock manually some content. The banner/label idea is great.
    Philippe

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  2. Thanks for the comment Philippe. Nice idea for unlocking content. I'll be covering the use of conditional activities in a later blog

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