The passports program helps students with failing attendance stay on track. The program requires students to check in with a mentor daily and log their attendance in a “passbook”. Students were incentivized to participate through a reward system where they were given prizes for coming to school. I helped to better the passports program by addressing challenges that existed for both staff and students.

One challenge that made the program difficult for students to benefit from was that they viewed checking in as a mundane task which lessened the chances that they would spend time opening up to staff about challenges that made attending school difficult. Furthermore, students did not have any real ownership of their passbooks as they were held and managed by staff. I tackled these issues through gamification and by re-designing the passbook allowing students to personalize its cover. The slip-in covers follow a simple design that encourages students to add their own flavor to it; they could even add stickers earned through the program.

Although incentives are a big part of the passport program, some administrators were opposed to using rewards/prizes as it conditions students to attend school for the wrong reasons. I addressed this concern by reimagining the process through which students are rewarded. My solution invites students to participate in a sort of attendance game where they receive a raffle ticket for a bigger prize at the end of the month each week that they have perfect attendance. Students rate how their day has been by shading in thumbs and other fun shapes as a way to provide feedback to their mentors. Staff is then tasked with verifying that a student has attended school on that date by stamping the corresponding row.

Students can earn additional tickets by completing the optional weekly challenge, a sort of quiz where they can help staff and mentors learn a bit more about them and how they are doing without needing to pry. The weekly challenge provides students with a safe space for communicating life challenges or events that may be influencing attendance and their learning experience.

In the process of developing our gamified Passbook, we considered what a schoolwide implementation of the passports program would look like. My recommendation was to promote competition between the grades and cohorts encouraging students to hold one another accountable. By launching a schoolwide challenge where classes and grades are encouraged to compete, we minimize the need for individual incentives and instead reward the grade with the most tickets with a seasonal prize such as a trip to an amusement park, or carnival day. Other recommendations included recruiting senior students as mentors to those in lower grades and rewarding students via certificates and no-homework passes as their attendance improves.