Preface
At my school, BASIS International School Nanjing (BINJ), there is a house system. It is stolen borrowed straight from Harry Potter, but with the four houses named after the four seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) and no giant floating automatic magical tubes. Instead, teachers hand out actual physical House Points (colored plastic chips), and students need to turn them in to a small tube in the cafeteria.
The littluns are thrilled about the house system. They just can’t get enough of those House Points. However, 
(bad calculus jokes). For non-nerds, this means that the higher a student’s grade is, the less they care about House Points and their house.
This is a problem.
Let’s fix it.
Details
So what is the problem actually?
I summarized the following points.
- Students lack a sense of belonging. In Harry Potter, students from the same house dine together, participate in Quidditch together, and share the same dorm and common area. What about us? We have common areas, but no one really “respects” them; we just sit outside our next class’s classroom.
- House Points are a fine thing, but there are no rules for when to hand them out. Some of my teachers never give them to students; others love giving them. This intransparency (that is a word mind you) disinterests students.
- Students like to hoard House Points. For what reason? No idea. (Why would someone like plastic chips that mean nothing outside of school?) But they do, and that brings money out of the circulation. Bad.
Proposed solutions
I drafted a proposal and sent it to our school officials to view. It identified those problems and potential solutions to them. Here is the summary.
Problem #1: Lack of belonging
This can be solved by making students’ houses more “visible”. We need to be able to see it every day, so that hopefully we will care more. Some possible solutions, therefore, are adding an ID badge (you know, the things we are supposed to bring to school every day?) background color, adding a color blob next to our names on Teams (you know, that Microsoft thing we use in school to chat?), and more house-based activities.
Problem #2: House Point distribution rules
Make those rules. (DUH) For example: answering/asking question in class, getting a good enough (set threshold, not subjective “good enough”) grade, outside activities, etc.
Problem #3: Hoarding House Points
Easy: we need motivation for students to turn in their House Points.
Just give them stuff!
These stuff include snacks, dress pass (so that you don’t need to wear uniforms like you are supposed to do every day), elevator pass (“The elevator to success is broken; take the stairs.”), etc.
Another way to solve this problem is…
DigiHouse
This is an overhaul of the house system. It’s… you guessed it… DIGITAL!
It utilizes Teams to distribute digital House Points. This system has a few big benefits:
- Eliminates the hoarding problem. Completely.
- Now we can record who got how many House Points. This information can be used to make some cool graphs and stuff. Also, we can have like an award for the “Top House Point Earner” award or something to increase the motivation to collect House Points.
- No need for little chips that cost money for the school!
I made a demo of this with Microsoft Power Automate. More on that later!
Conclusion
House good. Right now policies bad. Change policies to make good. 🙂
Appendix
The original proposal submitted: project-phoenix.pdf