The HTMW Gamification Update!

Keeping students engaged is more important than ever – which is the focus of the latest HTMW update!

This Fall, HTMW will feature new Rewards for assignments, Prerequisites to help with class pacing, and Badges to encourage students to above and beyond the class minimums!

Rewards: Instant Cash Bonuses!

The next time you set up your class Assignment, you’ll notice a new option – “Rewards”:

This is a brand-new way to make sure your students complete their work on time!

A “Reward” is a cash bonus that your students receive when completing the assignment.

This means students who finish their assignments get an instant boost in the Class Rankings – the perfect incentive to get their work done on time!

Prerequisites: Self-Paced Learning!

You might also notice another option when you’re creating your assignments – “Prerequisite”:

For the first Assignment you create for your class, this will be empty. This new tool will let you “queue” assignments for your students to let them learn entirely at their own pace.

By setting a “Prerequisite”, students will need to complete one assignment before they can progress to the next. As soon as students complete the “Prerequisite”, students are prompted to continue to the next set of lessons and activities, letting them move at their own pace.

Typical Use Case

As a teacher, I want to set up activities for my students every week, and I want to make sure everyone completes everything in a certain order. However, I know that some students might take longer than others.

I would:

• Set up my first assignment (“Week 1”), with a “Start Date” of today, with the first set of activities
• Set up my second assignment (“Week 2”), with a “Start Date” of a week from today, with the second set of assignments. I would set my “Week 1” assignment as a prerequisite.

For my students, everyone starts today and start work on the “Week 1” assignment. Next week, students who finished the first assignment are prompted to begin the “Week 2” assignment.

BUT students who have not yet finished the “Week 1” assignment need to complete that first. As soon as they do, the Week 2 assignment pops up for them to start too.

Combining “Start Dates”, “Due Dates”, and “Prerequisites” give teachers a whole new toolkit for giving students pacing and structure to their experience throughout HTMW!

Badges

Our last, and perhaps biggest, addition for engagement is our new Badges. Starting this Fall, students will be able to earn badges by completing certain actions throughout HTMW. This could include things like:

• Making their first trade
• Trading 5 Healthcare Stocks
• Shorting 10 Stocks
• Buying their first Mutual Fund
• Completing Personal Finance lessons in our learning center focusing on Credit and Credit Score
• …plus dozens of other challenges

After a student has earned a badge, they can set it as “Active”, and it will appear next to their name on the Rankings Page and throughout HTMW.

Clicking another students’ badge on the rankings page will show all the other badges earned, giving students a better incentive to explore HTMW and find new ways to diversify their portfolio.

Students can also “level up” certain badges by improving their mastery of a concept, encouraging students to go above and beyond class minimum requirements.

All of these features are completely optional. You will have the option to turn badges off in your class settings, and continue to utilize Assignments without setting prerequisites or rewards. However, these are powerful new tools in your kit to drive student engagement, and we’re excited to serve your classes this Fall!

If you want even more, you can check out our awesome new Budgeting Game (where your students take on the role of a college student with a part-time job, or someone who just finished school starting their full-time job), plus hundreds of new lessons in our Learning Center, dozens of new customizable teacher reports, and tons of new ways to use our awesome stock market game on our ad-free version, PersonalFinanceLab!