Looking to add a burst of recognition and excitement to your classroom? The Leader Badges Collection is your ticket to leveling up engagement and celebrating achievements all year long! With 10 unique badges in each themed collection, these fully customizable badges offer endless possibilities for merit recognition, skill development, and classroom fun. Whether you’re running a gamified yearlong course or just want to sprinkle in some playful motivation in a traditional setting, these badges are designed to be as flexible as your classroom needs.
Each badge comes pre-sized to fit into a trading card sleeve, so students can collect and showcase their accomplishments. The badges are available in a variety of themes — from Adventure to Space to Ninja — and teachers can mix and match badges across themes to create a unique, year-long experience. Each badge features an editable text area where teachers can either assign powers or perks (e.g., “Good for one free homework exemption”) or indicate why the badge was awarded (e.g., “In recognition of outstanding creativity”). Editing this section is a breeze, and teachers can even delete the text entirely if they prefer a more minimalist design.
In Track Attack, student teams answer review questions to earn the right to move their pieces forward along a vibrant race track filled with all sorts of colorful collectibles. As they race, they’ll pass through spaces that reward points and score multipliers, boosting their chances of victory. But that’s not all – power-up items are scattered throughout the track, giving teams the winning edge they’ll need to outmaneuver their opponents. Whether it’s banking points for safe keeping or unleashing playful mischief on rival racers, every turn brings new strategic decisions and excitement.
Adding to the exhilaration, each team can shift gears from first to fifth at any time throughout the course of their race, with each new gear unlocking faster speeds and richer power-up abilities. This gives students the chance to play things safe if they’re up against a question topic that feels a bit too challenging — or the power to lock in top speed by wagering even more points as they shift into higher gears. But there’s a twist – getting a question wrong means spinning out, which will cause a team to lose all unbanked points and have to start their throttle back over from first gear. This mechanic keeps the game fresh and thrilling, as teams must balance the risk of advancing too quickly with the reward of gaining a strategic advantage. It’s a race to the finish line where knowledge and strategy go hand in hand.
Activity Setup
Before diving into this activity, teachers should print out the badges of their selected theme (or themes!) and consider providing each of your students with a simple trading card sleeve page insert to keep with them in their binders for easy storage, badge collection, and display. Teachers are encouraged to explore the editable template, adjusting the badge text to reflect specific powers, achievements, or recognition criteria for their students.
How It Works
Fire up the slideshow and make whatever alterations to the starting template you’d like. All of the colors, icons, and text fields are fully editable — so feel free to tweak the default layout to suit your liking and customize these resources to really make them your own. Once you’re happy with whatever changes you’ve made, consider providing your students with an overview of each of the badges in your collection (along with how they can be won!) in order to build anticipation for the new badges and how students can earn them.
Introducing the Badge System: Share how the badges will be awarded throughout the year and explain how students can collect them. Teachers can set criteria for earning each badge, from classroom achievements to teamwork and creativity. If students are working asynchronously, float between teams to offer feedback, fostering a positive environment where students look forward to earning their badges.
Customization and Awarding: Adjust the editable text on each badge to suit your class needs — whether it’s recognizing effort or offering special privileges (like a homework pass). If preferred, teachers can easily remove the editable text or replace it with specific accomplishments or fun abilities.
Badge Distribution: Once awarded, students can slip their badges into trading card sleeves and store them in binders or folders, creating a personal collection that they can carry with them throughout the school year!
This activity encourages positive behavior, engagement, and a fun way to celebrate student success. Perfect for long-term gamified classes or traditional classrooms, the Leader Badges Collection brings motivation and recognition into every lesson!
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 800+ resources available and on their way to arrive shortly in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to all members with an active Engagement Engineer or Engagement Engineer PLUS account, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
