January 4, 2026
Silence Challenge now rewards students for quiet behavior!
Happy New Year! I'm excited to start 2026 with a major update to one of our most popular teacher tools: the Silence Challenge.
The Silence Challenge has been available as a free tool for a while, but now it's fully integrated with your classroom system - students can earn experience, mana, and gold for staying quiet, or lose health points when they're too noisy!
🐉 How the Silence Challenge Works
The Silence Challenge turns quiet behavior into a dragon-themed game. Your device monitors classroom noise using its microphone:
- When students stay below the noise threshold, the dragon sleeps peacefully
- When noise exceeds the threshold, the dragon wakes up and an alert is logged
- At the end of the challenge, students receive rewards that decrease with each alert
- You can optionally deduct health points as a penalty for excessive noise
The key mechanic is exponential reward decay - rewards are halved with each dragon alert. This incentivizes sustained quiet behavior rather than just brief moments of silence.
⚙️ Configurable Rewards & Penalties
When you start a Silence Challenge in your class, you can configure exactly what's at stake:
- Health penalty per alert - How much health students lose for each violation (supports fractions like 0.5)
- Experience reward - Base Experience students can earn (default 400)
- Mana reward - Base mana they can earn
- Gold reward - Base gold they can earn (if gold is enabled)
- Timer duration - Set a countdown timer for the challenge
- Noise threshold - Adjust sensitivity for your classroom
Your settings are automatically saved, so you don't have to reconfigure every time!
🎯 Extra Features for Convenience
We've added several features based on teacher feedback to make the tool work better in real classroom situations:
Pause Noise Tracking
Click the bell icon to manually enable/disable noise tracking at any time. This gives you complete control over when the challenge is active.
Pause/Resume
Need to give instructions or have a quick discussion? Hit the pause button to stop both the timer and noise tracking. The dragon goes to sleep, and noise won't trigger alerts while paused. Resume when you're ready!
False Alarm Button
Sometimes the dragon wakes up for the wrong reason - a dropped book, a sneeze, or a passing announcement. The "False alarm" button lets you remove incorrect alerts from the log so they don't unfairly reduce student rewards.
Noise Log with Timestamps
Every alert is logged with its exact timestamp (e.g., "2:15" into the challenge). You can:
- View the last alert at a glance
- Expand to see all alerts chronologically
- Remove any false alarms with a single click
- See the total alert count displayed prominently
🎁 Finish Dialog & Effects
When you click "Finish", a confirmation dialog shows you exactly what will happen:
- Total effects - Shows the final health loss, XP, mana, and gold after applying reward decay
- Active students - Lists all present, not-fallen students who will receive effects
- Excluded students - Shows absent or fallen students who won't be affected
- Dynamic title - Changes based on performance (e.g., "Congratulations! The dragon never woke up!" for perfect runs, or "Oh no! You woke the dragon too many times!" for poor performance)
Once you confirm, all effects are applied simultaneously to active students and logged in your Activity page.
🆓 Still Available as a Free Tool
The Silence Challenge without classroom integration remains completely free for all teachers. You can use it to monitor noise levels even if you don't want to connect it to your student rewards.
The classroom integration version is accessible from your class dashboard in the new "Class Adventures" section (marked as Beta).
📜 Mystery Events Remember Past Events
The Mystery Events system has also been improved to cycle through events without repetition, until all have been shown!
💡 Coming Soon
We're continuing to work on more classroom management features and adventures.
ClassMana will remain completely free while we polish these features and prepare for the eventual premium launch. Thank you for your patience and continued support!
🎁 Stay Connected
When we launch premium, we'll be giving away huge discounts to lucky Facebook and Instagram followers!
Make sure you're following all our channels to increase your chances:
That's all for now! If you have questions or feedback about the Silence Challenge, just reach out. I'd love to hear how it works in your classroom!
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