Success stories from digital service: Building an attendance game room

This month, the Earl Warren team has put together a virtual game room for our school as an incentive for attendance. When Earl Warren was in school physically, they had a game room on campus that students were allowed to access whenever the principal, Mr. Schlager, would open it. So, my goal was to transfer that into the virtual space. I created 2 google classrooms, primary (grades K-3) and intermediate (grades 4-6), filled with different games that the City Year team would be able to play with our students. Knowing that many of our younger students struggle just to navigate the digital space, the primary room includes games like Bingo, Simon Says, and 20 questions that center around active engagement to limit computer usage. The intermediate room on the other hand is a bit more advanced and includes games such as Skribblio and Jeopardy.

Last week, we completed a couple of test runs in each game room with 4th graders and 2nd graders. Both sessions went really well and a lot of the students in the zoom call expressed how excited they were. We heard great feedback from students like, “This doesn’t feel like school anymore!!” and, “I don’t want to leave!”

It was really nice to know we were able to accomplish that just with the trial period. Now, we are working on a few things that can make the game room even better with the official rollout set for the first week of December when classes will start competing against one another in attendance to earn time in the room. As a team, we are really excited to be able to support attendance in this unique way and have such amazing support from our new school’s administration.