Faculty Pedagogy Guide
Classroom practices from the instructor who developed Mastery Quests · October 13, 2026
When I built the four main Mastery Quests collections found on the Games page, I was also experimenting with different ways to use them in my own courses. Some approaches were planned from the beginning, while others emerged as I added features and saw how students interacted with the games.
With this guide, I want to share several ways I've incorporated Mastery Quests into my teaching and offer practical suggestions for using games you've created through the Composer.
1. Practice for Assessments
My original goal was to create games that gave students ample opportunities to practice the material they were learning. In particular, the four custom games were designed primarily for exam preparation.
But practice alone wasn't enough. Students also needed a way to determine what they understood and where they were struggling. That led to the development of the Mastery Report.
I encouraged students to play the games before exams and then use their Mastery Reports to evaluate their performance. Rather than simply reviewing everything again, they could identify their weaker areas and devote additional study time to those concepts.
This provides the first pedagogical application: assessment preparation with targeted review.
Think about the familiar question students ask before an exam: "What should I study?"
Rather than providing another general list of topics, instructors can direct students to the game. Students practice the material, receive feedback, and use their performance reports to identify areas requiring additional attention.
The game isn't making the exam easier. It's helping students make better decisions about how to prepare.
2. Low-Stakes Completion Assignments
A second approach emerged when I began assigning the games approximately one week before major assessments.
Initially, I encouraged students to use the games voluntarily. But encouraging students to practice and getting them to practice are two different things.
To address this, I began assigning the games for low-stakes completion credit. Students received credit for completing the activity rather than for achieving a particular score.
I also included the following disclaimer:
Because these activities are graded for completion rather than accuracy, using outside assistance to raise a game score provides no grading advantage and can make the mastery report less useful. Complete the game honestly so the report reflects what you actually need to review.
Hat tip to Dr. Dan Settlage for suggesting this approach.
The benefit is straightforward. Students have an incentive to complete a meaningful practice activity without the pressure of needing to achieve a particular score.
More importantly, the Mastery Report remains useful as a diagnostic tool. A student who receives a relatively low score hasn't necessarily failed the assignment. Instead, that student has identified concepts that need additional attention before the exam.
For implementation, instructors can create a completion assignment in their learning management system (LMS) and ask students to submit their end-game Mastery Report. This provides evidence of participation while allowing students to retain the report for their own review.
3. Low-Stakes Quizzes and Assessments
As additional game modes were developed, I began recognizing another possibility: instructors could use their own Mastery Quests games as assessments.
I would recommend keeping these assessments relatively low stakes, such as quizzes, rather than using them as substitutes for major examinations.
Although I've spent considerable time reviewing, editing, and revising the question banks, the style and difficulty of individual questions may not align perfectly with every instructor's assessment preferences. Furthermore, the adaptive nature of the games means students may encounter different questions and take different paths through the material.
These are advantages for practice, but they require consideration when assigning grades based on performance.
For lower-stakes quizzes, however, the games offer a way to diversify assessment activities while keeping students actively engaged with the course material.
Once you're comfortable using the Composer and a web-hosting service such as GitHub Pages, you can create and publish a game relatively quickly. The game can then be linked or embedded in your LMS.
If you want to review student performance, you can ask students to submit their game data and end-game reports through the LMS.
I routinely request both. The Mastery Report provides a useful summary of student performance, while the game data offers additional information about how students worked through the questions.
This also provides an opportunity for class-level feedback. If several students struggle with the same concepts, I can revisit those topics during class or provide additional instructional resources.
4. Class-Level Feedback and Instructional Adjustment
That third approach leads to another pedagogical move. When you collect student game data, you have an opportunity to identify concepts that may be giving students trouble. Not only does this allow you to provide class-level feedback, much as you might when reviewing exam results, but it also creates opportunities for instructional adjustment.
For example, why were students consistently missing questions about cross-price elasticity? Were they confusing substitutes and complements? Were they struggling to interpret the direction of the relationship? Or was something about the question itself causing confusion?
I approach this much like I do when providing class-level feedback on exams. Rather than simply giving students the correct answer, I also explain why I think a particular question was frequently missed. Sometimes students misunderstand the concept. Other times, the question may be poorly worded or unnecessarily confusing.
Because the game data allows me to examine the answers students selected, I can form hypotheses about the reasoning behind their mistakes and check those ideas in class discussion. This provides an opportunity to revisit the material, clarify misconceptions, or reconsider how a concept was originally presented.
In other words, the information is useful for more than evaluating student performance. It can also help us evaluate our own instruction.
Putting the class results to work
Here is a workflow another instructor can use with Class Answer Analysis:
- Ask students to submit their end-game Mastery Reports and game-data CSVs through an LMS assignment.
- Open Class Answer Analysis from Faculty Resources.
- Add the collected CSVs together, or add more files as submissions arrive.
- Compare detailed topics and, where the files include them, learning objectives. Check the response counts and game-run counts alongside accuracy.
- Use Questions to Review to find items worth revisiting. Compare first recorded exposures with repeated attempts when that distinction helps.
- Open a question to examine the distribution of selected answers and the saved correct answer, when available.
- Choose Copy Class Summary or download the results. Edit the feedback to fit your class, then prepare a discussion, worked examples, or additional practice.
With newer CSVs, the question wording and answer choices appear in the report. You do not need to search faculty question-bank PDFs simply to identify those questions. Older files may lack this information, and some exports have no saved answer key.
I would use a commonly selected incorrect answer as a starting point for discussion. A pattern can help me decide what to ask next; it does not establish the underlying misconception. Adaptive practice also means students may see different questions, and several game runs may belong to the same student.
Closing Thoughts
With that, I hope at least one of these approaches serves you well in your own courses. These are simply ways I've incorporated Mastery Quests into my teaching, and they're certainly not the only possibilities.
Perhaps you'll develop your own pedagogical move. If you do, and you'd like to share it, I'd be happy to hear about it and include it here for other instructors to consider.