reward chart

A small gamification victory with my daughter!

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Behaviour meter A small gamification victory with my daughter

Whilst I spin through a really busy time, I wanted to share with you a minor gamification victory with my daughter.

Anyone who has read my blog in the past, will know that I have been trying to use gamification around my daughters behaviour for a few years now. Not all (any) attempts have been 100% successful. The most gut wrenching failure was the use of the reward chart! However, in March, I decided to try a slightly less rewards based system – the Behaviour Meter.

This was a simple chart that displayed numbers 0 to 10, with an arrow pointing to the value that best described my daughters behaviour at the time. Whenever I felt her behaviour changed, I moved the arrow – simple!

Anyway, fast forward to this weekend.

  • Daughter: “Daddy, how come I am on an 8 on my chart. I thought I had been naughtier than that”
  • Me:  “Well, generally you have been pretty well behaved”
  • Daughter “I can’t wait to get a 10 on there”
  • Me: “That’s great, but you know there is no prize for getting a 10”
  • Daughter: “I know that, but I really want to prove I can do it”

She wanted to behave, because she wanted to. There was no desire for a reward behind it, she wanted to do it for her – it was intrinsic!

Now, I call this a massive win for fast and relevant feedback vs extrinsic rewards.

The next step is to lay out a few guidelines that she can follow to get her behaviour up to a 10!

Download a behaviour meter!

Gamification: Low tech real-time feedback

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Using gamification on my kids is nothing new. I have openly written about my failure as a gamifier when it came to my eldest daughters reward chart!  However, now I am trying a little experiment, one that is nice and low tech and involved no points or badges!

On our fridge we now have this little chart.

Gamified Feedback: Behaviour Meter

Throughout the day my wife and I alter the position of the arrow depending on how my daughter is behaving. We don’t tell her what the current reading is – she has to look at the feedback for herself. Of course this is on top of other verbal feedback we are giving her as well. However, this gives her a fixed reminder of how we feel she is doing.

At the moment there are a couple of things that we do with her if she is not doing well (before we had the chart). She loses her TV shows and the DS for example. It is also her birthday soon, so her party is forfeit at present due to a few little bumps in her behavioural road.  So, we have told her that if she gets to 7, she gets her TV shows. 8 gets her back her DS and a sustained 9 gets her back her birthday party!

What I am hoping is that as she is not collecting stickers, she is just able to visualise her behaviour at a glance, that this could be a more sustained way of working. The fact that she can go up and down and lose and gain things multiple times in a day, should keep her on her toes as well.

It is early days yet, but so far it has been interesting seeing her reaction as the meter drops away from 7 or 8. As I say, this is all in addition to ordinary parenting – but she seems to like being able to see how we feel about what she is up to. I have no idea how sustained it can be. The idea would be to remove any kind of incentive after her birthday and just have it there for her to see and take it from there.  I’ll let you know how we get on in a month!

Just a quick note about my Inspiration Cards. They are now fully available for sale – in the US and everywhere else.  Head over to the cards homepage to find out how to get hold of then!

 

 

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