What is Habitica? What parents need to know

My family’s been using an app called Habitica. You can just go to habitica.com, and you’ll be able to set up an account for this app. This is a way that has helped my kids keep track of some of the things that they need to do. My kids are pretty young, they are five and seven, and so they are not able to necessarily keep track of the assignments that they get or chores that I’d like them to get done, and this helps them keep track of things that they need to do while I continue to work and also helps motivate them with a reason to get them done. The way Habitica works is each person creates their own character. They start out looking something like this little guy here in the purple, pretty plain, and as they accomplish tasks, they earn experience points and health points and continue to level up with each thing they get done. As they level up, they’ll be able to choose a different class, which will give them different powers. Like this is my son’s character, he’s been able to collect some pets and grow them to be a mount, so he rides a purple wolf right now, and he has some skills which allow him to cast some spells. As a family, we have what’s called a party, and you can see these other party members up here, and we are able to go on quests together to fight bad guys or find different prizes within the app.

The way we use it is there are three different sections, well, four different sections if you count the rewards, but let me give you a quick overview of what each one is. First of all are habits. Habits are generally things that you want to, they’re little things that you want to be better about doing or want to discourage doing. So if I want my kids to drink more water, I can make a habit here. So for each glass of water they drink, they would get to add a little plus, and that gives them a little bit of experience points and adds up towards their gold up here, which they can use towards rewards. Rewards could be something that helped build their character, but it can also be things that I give them. So we can add custom rewards here, like saving up to get $25 to buy something from one of their favorite stores or getting to eat a piece of candy out of a usual circumstance. So habits help build towards that. So these are generally positive things, but I do also have a few things here for just general hit points. So you can see these are negatives instead, and if it’s something small or something big, I’ve got just listed here a few different ideas for what I would use these for. But if it’s something small like whining or bickering with each other, I might give them a hit point, or if we have a really hard day, they might get some bigger hit points, and we can say, hey, this is impacting our quest as a party, let’s work together and let’s help restore each other’s health. But this is just another way that if your child is maybe reward-motivated, this might be a way to help with some of those situations that sometimes come up. For the most part though, we really just focus on these positives here. This next section here called Dailies, these are things that repeat on a regular basis. So it might be every day, it might be once a week, it might be once a month, but these are things that we want recurring. Now, I don’t use a lot of these because what happens if you leave something unchecked in a daily is you do get hit points against you, and that will lower your health level, and if you go all the way down to zero for your health, you will go down a level and you’ll lose a piece of equipment. Now, for my kids, we don’t do a lot of these, but you can see here, here’s the things they’ve checked off so far for the day. They do have some things that they need to do every day, so these are generally small things that I have expectations for, and then what happens is as they check them off, they disappear off their list. Then I’ll just go ahead and check this one off for you, and watch in the upper right corner, you can see that we gained some gold, some experience points, and some damage to a boss that we’re currently fighting together. So they’re able to see which things they need to get done. So I have simple things like cleaning up after lunch, cleaning up after breakfast, feeding the pets, those types of small repetitive things I’ll use for dailies, but beyond that, I don’t use much in dailies.

Most of the things we use are in To-Dos. So To-Dos I have for school tasks and for chores for that day. So let me go ahead and scroll down, and I’ll show you some of the chores I already added. Chores for tomorrow. So some of the things I’m the kids to work on, and this is just for one of my children to help put away any laundry or maybe bring up dirty laundry. I want them to mop tomorrow, empty the dishwasher, and you can also have checklists. So I want him to clean the powder room, and what does that mean? So I want him to tidy the counter, wipe the counter and sink, check, is the towel clean, is there a clean towel in there, and is there any toilet paper in there? So he has a checklist of things to work through. Now, if your kids are pre-readers, they may not be able to get through this list on their own, but if you use the same things over and over, they’ll start to recognize some of these things, and you can always add emoji as well, and that can help make it a little easier to identify vacuuming which rooms they have to vacuum. Then we get into the school stuff. So you can see we actually have a school assignment that was intended for today but wasn’t, wasn’t gotten to, which is okay, so it’s there for tomorrow, and we can see that it should be a higher priority. Now, as we add things, what we can do is format using something called markdown, and if I click on this, you can see a little guide for how to format using markdown, but this allows us to have larger text, italicized, bold, even adding images, you can link to images that are online, different ways of formatting, adding links. Okay, so I’m able to use this. So when I get something from his teacher, I just copy and paste it in here, and then I use this hash sign here is for an h1 header, and that makes a larger text, and then I also have a link here. So when I save this, you can see I have a clickable link now that my son is able to click on, and he can hear the recording that his teachers provided, and he knows he has a nice large visual of what these characters look like. He’s in a Mandarin class, and then he has a checklist to work through, so he can check them off as he gets each word done, links to math games, so he knows how to click on this link that opens up the math game he’s used to from school, and then another assignment here. So let me go ahead and show you one. So I’m going to copying went over from an email from the teacher, so I’m going to say this is for his Bible class. I’m just going to paste in what we have, and I can make it an h1 header by using a hash sign for the line, and then I can also, I’m going to copy the link from the email, and I can use the markdown formatting here, and what you’ll do is you do the square brackets around the text that you want to add the link to, and then you can use the parentheses directly after that for the link, and then that allows me to link directly to the file. Okay, so then and then I can also rank it from easy to hard, trivial to heart, and this is practicing his memory verse, so I’m going to go ahead and medium, and that’s going to be for tomorrow. It’s saved, and now you can see he has a clickable link, and he’ll be able to practice that, that’ll bring him straight to the file that his teacher has made for him. Then I’ll add his Zoom meetings here as well and links to that, not that he’ll necessarily be able to type in his password and everything, if the kids are a little older that might be easy for them, but this also gives it a quick reference for my husband or I if we’re helping. So that’s how we use the habits, the dailies, and the to-dos to help motivate and get through each day, and that’s been really helpful for us. The favorite part for the kids is this inventory section here. So I’m going to go ahead and show you this is items. So as they accomplish their tasks, instead of just gold, every once in a while they will find an egg or a hatching potion or food items. What they can do is they have pets that they are able to hatch. So when they get eggs, they can use a different hatching potion to hatch a different type of pet, and as they feed it food, and especially if they pick a food that the animal likes, this little health bar will go up, and once it’s all the way full, they will have a mount that they can ride instead of just a pet. So that’s one of their favorite parts is being able to find and raise pets. That’s the extent of the interaction is literally just feeding it and then getting it to be a mount, so it’s not like a game where you interact and play with a pet, but you do get to have it as part of your icon, and so they seem to really enjoy that part of it. In addition to that, they can also level up their equipment. As they get more gold, they can buy different things for their character, which is a lot of fun too. So the kids have had a lot of fun with this. We’ve really enjoyed it and look forward to continuing to use it for chores as a way to have them help around the house and be motivated to do it.