suitepee7 said:
2) this system worked on the principles of bribery. the children were getting a reward for doing what they were meant to do in the first place. if you a permanent teacher for the class, all day achievements/all week achievements would be a much cheaper way of doing this.
3) my biggest concern is that these kids may have been interested because it was something new. the novelty of the idea may wear off eventually.
I'd like to chime in on these two points. First though, let me say Brian, well done.
Also, disclaimer: I was home schooled until college, with only minimal classroom experience (once a week for 6-8th grades, and then concurrently attending college in 11th and 12th).
Now on to the long term/bribery aspects (Excuse my atrocious use of comma splices in this next part, I'm a chronic comma user)
One of my FAVORITE classes was in 7th grade, and it was called "simulations" I have no idea if that was the actual class name or just the one the teacher told us. Looking back of course I realize it was a US history/Geography class. Our homework mainly consisted of coloring state maps (and filling in all the important details, large cities, monuments, geographical features) while also (I think this is right) answering some questions about the state (Population, when it became a state, etc). This was kind of boring to learn but also fun to do, because really, who doesn't like to color for a school assignment? Outside of this and other assignments I don't remember though, my favorite was the 10 minutes of class where we were dividing into groups and traveled along the Oregon trail. Essentially we were playing an extended group RPG in class. It felt very much like a game to me and the experience was what motivated me to behave myself in class. The better we were for the 'dull' parts the more time we had for the 'fun.' Also, it was slightly competitive since we were divided into teams (I still remember that only half my group made it because we got caught in the mountain pass just east of our destination, while the other group didn't make it at all because they chickened out and turned back to a lesser destination.) We did not receive rewards every week but on occasion we were receive food in keeping with where we were (beef jerky, some kind of themed candy).
Anyway, my point on this being that if you get a chance to have a recurring sub role, you should try to have daily achievements but also some longer, over-arching meta-achievements/goals to see if the idea is sustainable long-term.
. I hope you do proceed to record this on camera, I'd certainly love to see a documentary or something on this idea, and congrats and kudos to you for taking something like Gamification and actually applying it 
