Tip #2: Setup Your First Class

Once you've signed up, it's time to setup your first class. When you log in for the first time, you will be greeted with a series of prompts asking the name of your class, school and how long your course is. Fill all of that in based on your situation. Here's what I did for an example.

This can be changed later. As for now, pick one of your classes.

How much do you meet with your students?

Put in your school info.

The Korean school system usually runs from March to March, so I set it up accordingly. As you can see above, I don't think you have to use a real school, but it's probably better for the people at Classcraft if you use the actual place you work.

Once you have all of that set up, you arrive at the homepage. Yours might look different from mine, but it should be easy enough to navigate once you know what you're looking for.

This is your command center Gamemaster

If you'll notice, on the left, you can see a section labeled "Your Classes" This is where you can manage all of your classes. I don't think there is a limit to how many classes you can have, so go wild. I'm going to click on the Classcraft Korea. Once you click on a class, this message will pop up.

You need some players, but I'll be covering that in the next tip. For now, click 'Manager' At the time of writing this, they've really improved the interface. It wasn't bad before, but it seems a lot cleaner now. You have a lot of options on the left side, but we're only going to be focusing on a few. Namely: Behaviors and Game Settings. Let's start with Behaviors.

This is where you award XP or Experience Points, or subtract HP otherwise known as Hit Points. The system is identaical to any RPG you might play in that the more XP your character gets, the better off they are. They can level up, get gold, and upgrade their character. HP functions in the same way that if you lose all your HP, you're dead. We're not going to using HP for the first couple of months, because we don't want death to be an option for players who are just starting the game.

So for the XP, we need to adjust some of the values. I like to give a lot chances for my students to earn points in my class, so I set all the values to 10XP. I'll delve into why I do this in a later tip, but for now, let's set everything to 10 for simplicity's sake. Now this part is up to you, but here is how I award points in class.

Keep XP Simple

I keep it as simple as that. Now it's up to you how you want to reward your students, but I think the simpler, the better, especially for younger kids. 

Like I said, we're not going to get into HP until later months, but for now, you can just change some of the descriptions of why your students will lose XP. These are a couple of the heavy hitters in my class, of course, add your own as you see fit.

These should be the same as your class rules

And the last thing we're going to focus on for setting up the class is the Game Settings. This is important for the way the game progresses. You need to think about how long you'll be using each character with each student. If you're doing a full 12 months, you need space out the level cap so that your students progress at a rate that keeps them interested in the game. If they level up too slow, they may get bored with the game. If they level up too fast, then there is no challenge. From experience, I gave about enough XP per week to have the students level up once a week. This was because I was on a 3 month schedule instead of a 12 month. If you're going to use this for the whole year, I would suggest aiming for a level 24 by the end of the year, which means the student would level up twice a month.

Now this is going to get really 'mathy' but if a student gets an average of 100 XP per class (I'll explain this model in a future tip), and you see the child 5 times a week, then they should have 500 XP. If I want each of my students to level up twice a month, then I want them to level up once every 2 weeks. Which means, I should set the level cap to 1000XP. That way, by the end of the year, they should be around level 24. It should be noted that the highest level of unlockable equipment is level 18.

The rest is stuff we're not going to mess with now, but we'll change it so we don't have to come back later. Here's what mine looks like

The level cap needs to be adjusted to how many times a week you meet your students and how many months your class is. I've fond that leveling up once a week or once every two weeks keeps the students interested enough to keep enjoying the game. 

Next tip, we'll talk about the most effective way to add players into the game.