*Ukulele Music* Keith: Welcome to the LeeCoSchools Edcast #27 with our second repeat guest, Thomas Ashbaugh. We spoke with Thomas last year so he could tell us about his brainchild “Read2Mine”. Since then, he has been working on it a lot and I wanted him to come back on and give us an update. I would say more, but I’d rather you kept listening instead. So, after listening to this, if you have any questions, comments, complaints, criticisms, compliments, colloquialisms, conundrums, or concerns, you can find us on the web at www.lee.k12.al.us/EdCast, on Twitter and Instagram @LeeCoSchools, on Facebook at facebook.com/leecoschools, and we have our own icon on the Lee County App which you can find in Google Play or whatever Apple has now. Finally, you can email us at [email protected] I want to give a shoutout to my former co-host and producer from the beginning, Mr. Kyle Christian. Thanks, bud, for making me sound smarter than I am. Without further ado….Allons-y! *Funky Transition Music* Keith: Thomas thanks for coming back to the podcast just to remind everybody who may not have listened to last year's episode give us a quick little recap of who you are and your your professional journey and how you got here and then tell us a little bit about the genesis of Read to mine Thomas: thanks for having me back I'm Thomas Ashbaugh in the network engineer for Lee County Schools I've been here about nine years now enjoyed every bit of it and last year we worked with a system that I had found called mine test it's just a game engine you download mine test and you can build your own game with it it looks like Minecraft so I've been developing a game that we've called read 2 mine and our students have engaged in it last year and we've seen some beneficial increase in reading performance through accelerated reader points Keith: and so you came up with the idea of it because of these all these phone app games and the things that they do - yes get people to constantly get into it and so you decided to turn that - good mm-hmm by instead of because all these little galleries little game to pay to play don't Thomas: they make you jump through all kinds of hoops yeah though they'll make you watch ads download and install other games and play to level five on those games and I've seen my kids do that just to get a few coins and digital currency in this game that they actually like to play Keith: yeah so frankly I'm getting tired of ads invading every single aspect of my life I'm expecting ads to be beamed into my dreams in the next decade or so that's funny but anyways you decided to take this thing but turn it to good Thomas: yes I've noticed that kids will do above and beyond just to get digital items that aren't really real they don't cost us anything to make them other than a few minutes of our time so I made a system where we can implement digital items every few weeks to keep them incentivized to want to read another book to buy some more cool content whereas on the mobile industry they make you spend $5 year $2 there to have more coins or watch an ad well in this case the students will do what they're supposed to be doing anyway read a book take an ar test but now they can spin those points instead of the points just sitting out there and one kid at the end of the year getting a trophy now all the kids can see a benefit from their hard work of reading books Keith: yeah so this past year was the first full year of the program running right yes and so what kind of improvement did we see in numbers with read to mine as an incentive Thomas: I was watching pretty closely the by-school number of ar points and then comparing it to last year's data per ar points and since different schools have different numbers of students I went ahead and just made an average of the average ar points per student for the for the school year compared to last year at that point in the year last year and at the end of the year I've got the total and we saw a 60% increase in ar points per student for all of the elementary student only this elementary just all the elementary schools we've got a 60% increase in ar points per student which is pretty good that's incredible yeah what we're see is when that state report card comes out all of our schools we've been told you know about numerous studies that reading improves cognitive behavior improves your test-taking skills so we want to see all of our schools go up we want to see their reading and global scholar go up because all of our students you know put in a lot more time reading this year than they did last year which should by all accounts and all the studies make everything look better on all of our school report cards yeah so when that comes out I'd be excited to see those numbers Keith: yeah but that's it that is a dramatic increase in the number of points per student on average Thomas: yes well some schools will use the system pretty heavily yeah and some schools picked it up towards the middle of the year and some schools didn't use it as heavily you know there were a few schools that had 117 percent increase 136 percent increase 84 percent increase the most the top 3 schools there ar points per student over doubled yeah from the previous year Keith: and we even that some of the students even kind of were able to pressure a couple of the last holdouts to finally pick up the system exactly yes the middle of the year right Thomas: by Christmas time we had every elementary school using Read2Mine that's awesome and their points and improved some of that may be attributed to the fact that we were rating all the schools we're making a air of competition and that competition also helps oh let's do better than this other school next door you know so I feel like competitiveness could be an improvement as well Keith: nothing wrong with friendly competition Thomas: yes absolutely a motivator Keith: now if we can get the principals to really buy into it and maybe figure out some way to encourage their students to be the number one in the county yes and and get that to if we can get it I don't say a fever pitch but if we can if we can increase the the fun and the competitiveness around it I mean competitive reading how amazing would that be yeah so I think I think that would be that's down the line but I think it's coming Thomas: I'm working on a scoreboard idea either in the game or on the computer desktop backgrounds something though that will show up the live rankings of each school or maybe maybe just each grade level something like that some form or fashion of way to to promote a little bit of competition mm-hmm because that's a big motivator more than the in-game content could be digitally yeah but the in-game content is pretty fun we Keith: tell us about some of the improvements that you made you've been working on it off and on but we wanted to very heavily for over the over the course of this past year so what are some of the new things new content new ideas that are already implemented and then what's what some of the stuff was coming down the pike still Thomas: well we started out with just one server and if that server locked up or crashed everyone we kicked out until until I got it fixed we've since split that off into about four servers now all the students were in fact in one server begin with but we found that if a whole lab at one school and another school got on at the same time it made it a little bit slower it was laggy as the students would say yeah we fixed that by pairing the schools off two schools do to each server just about and that means we can have about four times as many players on line at once and it's before we did that right up into the school year just before the end of school rush when there was some free days towards end of the year and everyone was online at the same time so that that made the end of the school go pretty smoothly this year but before that I'm writing all this code myself and I'm not a video game designer I'm not a programmer I'm a network administrator so there were some some learning curves for me when it came to designing a system that worked fine in test environment but when I implemented it for 30 people online at one time then the bugs creep their little heads out Keith: yeah but I mean every game designer has that yes we get infinite patches until the game dies or the heat death of the universe one of the two so from from what I have observed there are some games that I've played before that basically were unplayable day one because of patches that needed to be downloaded and put in so don't beat yourself up on that even you've done from what I observed it's it's been pretty pretty successful Thomas: yep and we're continuing to add new areas for the students to explore I found that not just adding things on the wall that they can buy like a new frigerator or a stove for their minecraft house that they found that fun but for the most part they they tend to ignore that that type of new content they love to explore new areas so I've been having my daughter design new houses and in new areas at Christmastime and released the winter wonderland holiday area that they could go to and it was all candies and and snow and gingerbread houses giant Christmas tree yes yes and so so that was fun for them to go explore that then we had reindeer and whatnot and around spring break time and released the tropical paradise area for them they're exploring with new houses and they could buy like beach houses yeah instead of just a regular old minecraft style houses and they