It’s not surprising that some players will choose to try and guess their way through the educational content in hopes of progressing faster in the game. And it’s hard to blame them for trying, given that we’ve all looked for short cuts before ourselves. It’s human nature to want to find the shortest, easiest, path to your goal.
That said, we’ve built our game such that the best and most efficient ways to progress (building your dwell, being a stronger challenger, running farther, accessing more avatars and race routes) is to actually try on the educational content. The only way to progress is to get correct answers, and in order to access more features, faster, the best move is to aim for question streaks (multiple correct questions in a row).
Here are two tips and one trick you can share with your students if you find they seem to be leaning on guessing.
Question Streaks
Both Dreamscape and Dreamseeker Drift have a special reward for players who get question streaks.
In Dreamscape, players can unlock a reward box by answering 5 questions correctly in a row. In the reward box, they’ll find mCoins, exclusive skins, decorations and more. They can track their progress to unlocking a box right in the question window.
Over in Drift, 3 question streaks earn players a star. Stars are needed in order to buy new avatar skins or unlock new places to run in. Similarly to Dreamscape, they can track their progress as they answer questions.
Leaderboards
Leaderboards are currently exclusive to Dreamscape. There are two versions of the leaderboard, one where each player competes against all other players and one where players compete as their class. The quickest and most efficient way to rack up points on the leaderboard, is to focus on getting question streaks. Points are rewarded for each question correctly answered that is part of a streak (so from the second question onwards).
Time Boost
The Time Boost is a game mechanic that is exclusive to Dreamscape. When activated, it allows the player to double the impact of their correct answers, allowing them to build and upgrade faster, and earn resources and challenges faster. However, there are three big caveats:
- Players can only use it once per day.
- It costs 15 mCoins to activate.
- It lasts for 15 consecutive question attempts.
That last one is the biggest when encouraging accuracy. If players guess their way through a time boost, they will lose out on the big impact it can have, as each wrong answer uses up one of those question attempts. To get the best return, players need to aim for accuracy.
Assignments
This is less of a tip and more of a “trick” over which you, as their teacher, have the most control. In your dashboard, you have access to an assignment library of over 700 assignments from grade 1 through 8 covering a wide variety of skills and topics.
Unlike the placement test, when you give an assignment to your students, they see that it is active right in their question window. Knowing that the content has been specifically chosen for them by their teacher (and therefore that their teacher is likely watching their answers more closely—you can see them all in the assignment report), players end up having a much higher accuracy.
While students are always going to look for shortcuts, we are busy working, too: introducing and improving on existing game mechanics and features to not simply counter them, but to motivate them to want to do better. And also so that you, as a teacher, can be confident that our games and platform will provide your students with not just an incredibly engaging play experience, but one that prioritizes and emphasizes learning at the heart of it.