Moodle plugins directory: Stash | Moodle.org
Stash
Frédéric Massart ⭐The stash block is a good way to encourage more interaction with activities and is invaluable for teachers looking to gamify their course.
This plugin introduces a block that shows students items that they have picked up through the course.
The teacher can create items and then place them in activities and resources for students to find.
Items can be set to be collected once and encourages exploration of the course material. It is also possible to set an item to have an unlimited supply from a set location. This could encourage students to return to specific areas to collect more items.
You can also check out this video:
Quick start
We've crafted a sample course for you to try, it is the best way to see what this plugin has to offer. Please accurately follow those steps:
2/ Install the three following plugins (without exception)
- This plugin (block_stash)
- The availability plugin (availability_stash)
- The filter plugin (filter_shortcodes)
4/ Restore this backup file as a new course
5/ Enrol a student in the new course
6/ Now, login as that student and try the course
Important note
In order to make this plugin easier to use and fully featured, please also install:- The availability plugin (availability_stash)
- The filter plugin (filter_shortcodes)
- NEW! The tinyMCE plugin (tiny_stash) -- Greatly improves the experience of creating and inserting items and trades.
They are highly recommended.
Screenshots
Contributors
Just wanted to leave positive feedback that the new Stash Block, Stash Availability, and Stash snippet filter works together flawlessly and allows teachers to be quite creative with their courses (e.g. find 3 Gold Coins to trade in for a Gold Key which can than unlock an answer key or a new section of the course)....
Quick question: I was trying to test out backing up and restoring my course between servers, and it didn't look like the Stash block supported that function yet....or I might be missing a setting...
Any chance this is already implemented and I missed a checkbox, or can we request this as a future feature?
Thanks for sharing all your great work with the Moodle community!
Thanks for the kind messages.
Backup should be working, we are distributing a backup of one of our demo course in the description of the plugin here above and it seemed to work whenever we tried to restore it in other sites. Note that you must have the same suite of plugins installed on the other sites.
Could you describe a bit more what you are experiencing?
Wow--thanks for your quick reply!
I was testing out seeing if my course would restore to another server with all of my Stash items / swaps / snippets intact, and I double-checked that all 3 of the Stash plugins (block, availability, and snippet filter) were the same versions. However, after performing the restore, my Stash block shows up empty.
This is a rather large course (over 270Mb) with over 20 Stash items and several trades, so it is pushing the limits!!! I will try again and restore only a small section of the course to a blank course to see if that makes a difference and report back....
Thank you again for sharing your great work with the Moodle community--I don't think there is any other tool quite like Stash out there for gamification and it's adds some much needed fun to our courses!!!
Wanted to report that backup and restore worked perfectly on a Moodle 3.2 instance with 2 very large courses (over 250MB) with several hundred activities, many Stash objects, Trades, and conditional access to activities via the Stash availability plugin...AWESOME set of tools for gamification! Can't wait to see what kind of creative things people come up with the Stash set of tools!!
Stash currently prevents the non-editing teacher role from working (they will get an error message and can not access your course). There are also small conflicts with the amazing Snap theme from Moodlerooms, but it is not a big deal (I think it is how Snap deals with blocks--menu navigation doesn't work but the breadcrumb trail does--not a big deal once you train teacher).
Overall, Stash is the BEST plugin for gamification of your course because it is so brilliantly implemented to allow for teacher creativity with the Trade and Availability tools for conditional access! Thank you!
Thanks for sharing your enthousiasm! I believe that Adrian and I already discussed the complexity for non-editing teachers to use the plugin. I'm confident that we will simplify this in a future release.
Thanks for sharing your solution!
Wanted to report and verify that Carlos solution worked for adding non-editing teachers to a course--fantastic!
Small bug report: I tried resetting a course to get ready for a new semester, and it looks like Stash does not have Course Reset implemented yet (not clearing out the Stash items and locations, but rather clearing out old students and items acquired). Not a big deal, but something to implement as Stash is used more and more by teachers around the world!
Thank you!
Sorry about the inaction of late. I've been extremely busy trying to prepare for the GDPR compliance required later on this year.