An earlier version of this article was published on 17 November 2015.

Badges represent an interesting way to accredit pupils on their achievements. Badges are not a new concept, they have just become digitised. 

The attractive thing about badges is that a school can invent their own categories and achievement levels. For example, you could have a badge that indicates an understanding of loops, one for conditional statements, one for "Basic understanding of computational thinking" (however "Basic" is defined), and so on.

For pupils who find Computing difficult, this kind of micro accreditation could provide a good incentive to keep on keeping on.

The badges could also build up until a skills passport or similar is completed -- although I harbour doubts as to the soundness of competency-based accreditation, which is what that would amount to. The reason is that the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts.  Applied to Computing this means that a pupil may well have all the necessary skills, fully accredited, yet still not be able to “do” computing. Still, there are ways to address this.

Getting back to badges, they are well worth exploring. The nice thing about digital badges is that they can reside in the cloud and be available to students wherever they happen to be, and they can easily be shared.

You can, of course, produce badges in the traditional format. The illustration above is one I created in Big Huge Labs. I would not necessarily recommend that though. It’s OK for illustrative purposes or for the odd occasion, but it’s too labour-intensive and time-consuming to be feasible at scale.

An alternative approach would be to use mail-merge with a spreadsheet listing each student’s achievements and a set of cards or labels for your printer.

An even nicer one might be to tell your students about Big Huge Labs and let them create their own badges (you can always check their accuracy).

You might think that non-digital badges are rather passé, but it depends what you want to use them for. Some years ago I asked for students to help me run an open evening. Several volunteered, and I gave each one of them a badge to wear on the night not unlike the one shown here. The students beamed with pride!

I’ve also seen this sort of thing done in schools where there’s a cadre of pupils who are “official” education technology experts who assist teachers when required or even run “surgeries” to help fix other pupils’ tech issues.

So don’t write off non-digital badges just yet!

To get started with digital badges, look at Open Badges. Just a warning though: my favourite digital badge website appears to have been discontinued. I haven’t looked at Open Badges in a long time, and it may have changed since I recommended it originally some years ago. Therefore, do take the time to examine it thoroughly.