Cane Bay Middle has created a fun incentive to get all of its students more engaged in their i-Ready work, an online curriculum that provides students with differentiated instruction and supports them on their individual paths to success in math and reading.
As Cane Bay Middle students compete in what is being called the i-Ready Grand Prix, they are earning “laps” that are essentially points for their classrooms. As classrooms earn points, they move ahead in the Grand Prix, subsequently helping each participating student thrive in his/her i-Ready work and getting their classroom one step closer to earning a special prize.
This race is the brainchild of the school’s i-Ready committee, led by creative writing teacher Rebecca Croskey. After coming up with the idea of a Grand Prix to get all students more engaged in their i-Ready lessons, the committee took it a step further by asking Gateway to Technology teacher Jeannette Hartstein to get her students involved in an interactive way of explaining the rules of the Grand Prix to the rest of the student body.
Hartstein’s students have dabbled in a coding program called Scratch, so she had all eight of her classes develop their own playable, virtual racetracks that would explain the rules of the Grand Prix every time a student logs into the game. The plan was to select the best game to use as an introduction to the Grand Prix.
“They loved the idea of the competition part of even making a game,” Hartstein said.
Students were given the option of looking up photos of racetracks on the internet, or draw one on their own to develop digitally. Some students created their backgrounds in Canva and brought them into Scratch, while some created them in Google Drawings.
The basics of the assignment was for them to create a game with a racetrack background, at least one sprite – which is any kind of character or object that one adds to a game – and a code that can control a little racecar using keys on a keyboard.
The first students to complete that part were then challenged with adding the rules of the i-Ready competition to their game. Hartstein said some students had little characters “saying” the rules in speech bubbles, some of them had the screen change to a different background that explained the rules – it was entirely up to the students, she said.
Hartstein was impressed by all the ideas and details her students developed.
“They thought of so many things that I would never have thought of,” she said. “It was a tough decision and there was a lot of great entries, and I’m just really proud of how they took to this assignment.”
While Hartstein was initially going to pick the best developed game overall to use for the competition, she ended up getting torn between the work of two students: seventh-grader John Carver D’Amato and sixth-grader Parker Narkovich.
Hartstein said all of her classes did a great job in taking on the task, but these boys went above and beyond with their code and demonstration of the rules. Now the whole school has the option of using either game to compete in the Grand Prix.
When a user accesses one of the boys’ games in Schoology, what comes up is a circular racetrack and a little racecar. The user operates keys on the keyboard to make the racecar complete a lap around the track.
When the car completes a lap, a sign will pop up to the user, explaining the rules of the Grand Prix. Four laps around the track equals four rules that will appear.
Both Narkovich and D’Amato said they enjoy STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education and particularly have fun being creative with coding.
“You can just make anything new – anything you want,” D’Amato said.
The students also said they really enjoy having Hartstein as a teacher.
“She finds personalized ways for me to learn,” Narkovich said.
It might be too soon to learn how well students are doing in their i-Ready work, but Hartstein said she can tell the Grand Prix concept has reached students already. She has noticed, in their downtime, students are logging into Narkovich and D’Amato’s games to learn the rules of the competition.
A lot of classmates have given good feedback to the creators of the virtual racetrack games.
“I’ve had a bunch of people say, ‘Did you really create that?’” Narkovich said.
D’Amato and Narkovich’s games involve using keys on a keyboard to go make the racecar go around the track. They both personalized it in different ways; for example, in Narkovich’s game, he made it so nobody can “cheat” on a lap by making their racecar go backwards over the Finish Line. His game shows the user their lap time; Narkovich’s personal best lap time is 3.9993 seconds. His game is also adorned with the i-Ready logo.
Hartstein has another six grade student, Liam Gorby, who did an excellent job coding a driver in a game. Gorby added a sprite behind the driver so that when the racecar takes off in the game, tire track marks appear in its wake. Hartstein loved Gorby’s driver coding so much that it became incorporated in Narkovich’s game.
“I have always liked coding and making games,” Gorby said, adding that he always enjoys Hartstein’s class.
The school has created a visual for classroom progress in the i-Ready Grand Prix by making racetrack posters that have been hung up in the hallways. Each homeroom has been provided with a paper race car that they decorated and named.
Croskey said classes can earn up to four laps per week for completing their i-Ready work. Every week there are drawings for children who are meeting their targets to win a prize, and the school also has prizes for teachers to incentivize them and reward their hard work. Each homeroom that wins can also earn a badge, which is part of Cane Bay Middle’s incentive program that allows them to earn additional prizes.
As a teacher’s classroom makes progress in i-Ready, their racecar gets to move along the track toward a finish line. Seeing their classroom’s progress will hopefully motivate students to remember to log in to Schoology, access the virtual games, learn the rules of the Grand Prix and keep making gains in i-Ready.
“We are still developing the final prize, but our vision is that our robotics classes will program a set of robots that look like race cars and the winners will have a party with food and snacks where they can race the robots around the track,” said Croskey.
Narkovich and D’Amato’s advice for anybody learning to code: take it one step at a time.
“It all gets better at the end. You put it altogether and you can see what you’ve done,” D’Amato said.
