Can I (or my kids) enter points online, instead of printing out a page?
We studied this approach with a group of our members and concluded it was the wrong way to go. Here were some of their comments :
- As an overall process, checking things off on a sheet of paper and entering just one number each week was much less time-consuming than logging in and entering a checkmark for each and every item.
- Even with kids promising to do it ("we're online anyway")
- kids tend to tire of it after not very long, like they do of pretty well all games. And then it's up to the parent to do the data entry. That got old real fast.
- Parents usually need/want to see this daily or they tend to forget what was done (and you don't want to get into a battle of whether things were really done last Tuesday!).
- One of the benefits of online entry might be that you could track individual behavior items over time. However, parents told us that after finding it interesting for about two weeks, the benefit was miniscule compared to the effort. They really didn't need to see a history of each and every thing that was done or not done by their children. They already had a pretty good idea.
So a system that only involves entering one number each week - quick and simple - was vastly preferred. From our point of view, online checkmark entry for each item is not a sustainable process for most families, and our focus is on creating a family process that will last over time.