Competency X Launch

All our teachers at Del Lago Academy introduced Competency X to the school this past week.  It is a blast to see scholars hard at work curating artifacts of learning that demonstrate competency in an area highlight by a digital badge.  We got to this point by introducing Competency X through a clip from the movie Up.  In this clip, we see Russel trying to earn his Assisting the Elderly badge to become a Wilderness Explorer.   

Scholars were asked to ponder Russell's motivations for earning the badge and why they mattered so much to him.  From a discussion on these points, scholars were asked to act out skits with props that map out future outcomes for Russell if he did not earn the badge.  This helped us address several key questions for scholars:

• What is a badge?
• Why do badges matter?
• How do badges get used?

Scholars explored the things that they can be badged in and discussed how they might better use badges to market their own skills, knowledge, and dispositions.

This was followed by a short testimonial video produced by DLA TV that shared the experiences of scholars that helped create the badges and how they work.

We then used the Nerdy Delight badge as a practice badge to teach the workflow and let scholars experience success on Day 1.  Nerdy delight is that feeling you get when you accomplish something you did not think was previously possible.  We asked scholars to pick a "thing" where they experienced nerdy delight in the past and curate the following two artifacts:

1. What is your “thing” and why is it your thing?
2. What skills and knowledge have you gained by being interested in that subject or activity? 

This practice opportunity with earning a badge has certainly helped my scholars better understand how to approach curating artifacts for badges, such as Error Analyst.  Following our launch, I had scholars collecting videos like the one below to best represent skills, such as explaining how experimental errors affect the validity of a conclusion for an experiment.

As you can see in this video, this scholar's lab partner captured footage that shows how not all the mass of the soil was added in to the calorimeter.  They later used this clip to explain the error and how it affects the claim they made about what soil type is best for protection in an extreme heat event, like the Dinopocalypse.

While we love to focus on the badges, it's the curated reflections of learning experiences that we are beginning to treasure most.  Now that we've launched Competency X, expect this blog to be a regular place to check out our learning with this project.  Our full badge progression map will soon be shared with the outside world.  We're waiting on the badge graphics to be completed by scholars before we fully share the new industry co-created badges.