High Score: How I Gamify Every Classroom Activity With Scores and Live Leaderboards

Finishing an activity and doing well on it are not the same thing. A checkmark tells me a student got to the end. It doesn't tell me whether they cared how th

ey got there. So every activity I make has a score, and my students compete for the high score.

Where this comes from. I've been making classroom games since about 2010. I teach 11th grade Government and Economics at Vantage Career Center in Ohio, and my students play on Chromebooks. Along the way, I studied gamification through my master's degree and post-master's graduate work. At Colorado State University Pueblo in 2026, that included Gamification in the Classroom and Leveraging AI in Education. Professor David A. Beyers designed the Gamification in the Classroom course, and he's been my mentor for about a year. Much of how I think about scoring and leaderboards grew out of that course and his mentoring, and I'm grateful for both. At Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), it included AI for Teachers, AI for Students, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Bloom's Taxonomy, and Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK).

A score, not a checkmark. Every activity I make has a score, not just completion. That one change shifts the question students ask. It stops being "Am I done?" and becomes "Can I do better?" A score gives a student a reason to go back in, try a new strategy, and play one more round. Students compete for high scores, and that competition does work a completion box never could.

The leaderboard. A score matters more when other people can see it. My games export scores to a Google Sheet, with student info protected. I embed t

hat sheet on my games site, tinyurl.com/mrdai, so students can see where they stand and compete for high marks. It increases engagement. A leaderboard turns a solo activity into a shared one, and the top spot is always up for grabs.

Easy to play, hard to master. That's my design philosophy for every game. Easy to play means every student can start on the first try, no matter how they feel about the subject. Hard to master means the high score takes real work. For some students, maste

ry means sharp thinking. For others, it means persistence. Sometimes mastery is just not quitting. A leaderboard rewards both, because the student who keeps trying can climb just as surely as the student who gets it right away.

Background knowledge, not rote memorization. A score only means something if the game asks students to think. My games build on what students already know from their own lives and from earlier lessons. They aren't flashcard drills with points stapled on. When a game connects to background knowledge, a better score means a better understanding, not just a better memory.

How to set it up. You don't need my exact setup to try this. The idea is simple, and it works with any game or activity that can produce a score.

Step 1: The game posts a score. When a student finishes, the game sends the result to a Google Sheet. Each attempt becomes a new row.

Step 2: Keep the full sheet private. The sheet that collects results can hold whatever you need for grading. That sheet stays with you and never gets shared with students.

Step 3: Build a safe view. Make a separate tab that pulls in only safe columns, like a nickname or initials and a score. Sort it from highest to lowest.

Step 4: Publish or embed only the safe view. Google Sheets lets you publish a single tab to the web. Publish the leaderboard tab, not the whole file, and embed it on your class site or games page. Before you share the link, open it in a private browser window and check that nothing else shows.

How we build the games. We build in two steps. First, Claude, the AI assistant I work with, writes the base code plus a set of markdown instructions, which are plain-text notes on how the game should look and behave. Then Grok Build does the visual code. I decide what the game should teach and what earns points.

Try something like this. If you want to start small, pick one activity you already use and ask what a score would look like. Maybe it's accuracy, speed, or how far a student gets. Add a leaderboard that shows only nicknames and scores, and watch what happens when students can see the top spot.

You can play my games for free at tinyurl.com/mrdai. Try one yourself before you use it in class, and let me know how your students do.

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