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Below is Part 1 of our interview with Classcraft ambassador Laura Trauth, who teaches at the college level both in the classroom and fully online with students. Read Part 2 here.

Laura Trauth has been a total geek since childhood, from seeing The Empire Strikes Back 10 times in theaters to playing Dungeons & Dragons during lunch in high school.  She has a PhD in modern European history and Master’s degrees in humanities and geospatial information sciences. In her spare time, she reads comic books, hikes, gardens, and plans out more ways to gamify her classes.

Thanks for talking with us today, Laura! To start, tell us a little about yourself as an educator and what classes and grade levels you teach.

Laura Trauth: I’ve been teaching a long time. I actually started back in the late 1980s as a teaching assistant for biology classes. Since then, I’ve taught, TA’d, or tutored everything from biology to chemistry to math and history. Mostly, I’ve taught college freshmen and sophomores, although I’ve also taught SAT prep classes for a few years. Of course, that was high school and even some middle school students.

I started teaching full-time at the Community College of Baltimore County in 1998, and I’ve been there ever since. I teach U.S. history classes, Western Civilization survey classes, and the occasional sophomore-level history class as well, like Diseases in History. I’m currently working on a History of Crime and Punishment.

Right now, I use Classcraft with everything. So this semester and summer, that’s five history classes, some online and some face-to-face.

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