Once our school decided to move forward with a student gamification platform to teach technology skills, we discussed design.  At Bettendorf, Christopher Like used a Google website to show all the information.  When teachers completed learning about a skills they would complete an assessment reflection in a Google Form.  His whole gamification platform was based in Google.

While that was great, it presented a few problems for us:

1. The assessment pieces needed to be more than just reflections.  We wanted to make sure our students learned something so we wanted them to be a little more "test" like rather than just a text reflection.  Or we wanted them to be able to submit proof or evidence (actually submit a movie rather than just reflect on making one)

2. We have over 200 students and I wasn't too excited about looking at the spreadsheets and trying to manage answers in forms from 200 respondants.  

3. We hadn't made the more to the full Google Domain yet so there was some confusion about Google accounts and using Google within our domain.

4. We wanted a security factor so that Todd couldn't just go to the website, pretend to be Terry and complete his challenges.  Although technically you can find ways to do this, we wanted to make sure it was at least a little difficult.

I had been using Edmodo in my classroom for years and liked the way that was set-up.  I thought an LMS would would perfect for this gamification platform.  Each level could be a course and one a student "unlocks" the next course, they could be added to the next level.  

But I'd also been playing with the Canvas LMS and thought: "If I'm going to try this, why not go big?".  I'm using the Free for Teachers Canvas, so we aren't paying for all the full options and integration but it's pretty amazing.  Each Level of the Tech Challenge is built as a course inside of Canvas.  Each challenge is built as a module in Canvas.  A module is like a little unit and includes all the instructional material and the assessment component.