Make Your Students Earn Their Investments with Jumpstarter and Teacheon (New Classroom Templates!)

Dustin Rimmey
2 days ago
6 min read

Last Monday, I shared the GoFundMe in the Ditch That Textbook online community. (You should definitely join!!!)

When I shared it, I described it as "an off-the-rails idea for a 'social media' template," and a "shower thought meets asking Claude some questions meets Canva during my plan."

I expected some nice engagement. Maybe a few teachers saying they'd try it. What I did not expect was for the community to hand me two more ideas before the day was over.

That is the thing about sharing your work publicly. You think you are giving something away. What actually happens is the people you share it with make it better, bigger, and more interesting than you could have made it alone. The Ditch That Textbook community did exactly that, and this post is the direct result.

Two new templates. Two new thinking modes. One post.

Welcome to Jumpstarter and Teacheon.

Wait, Didn't We Just Do This?

Sort of. If you missed last Monday's post, the GoFundMe activity asks students to create a crowdfunding campaign on behalf of a historical figure, character, concept, or cause from your current unit. The story, the stakes, the goal amount, all of it functions as a disguised mastery check that looks like a meme and thinks like an essay.

Here is the distinction that makes today's templates genuinely different, and it is worth spending a moment on because it is the whole pedagogical point.

GoFundMe is an emotional appeal. People give because they are moved. Because they care. Because the story reached them in a way that made opening their wallet feel like the right thing to do. The thinking move underneath it is: how do I make someone care about this enough to act?

Jumpstarter and Teacheon are different. They ask a harder question.

What do people get in return?

Sometimes people give from the heart. But a lot of the time, maybe most of the time, people are looking for a return on their investment. They want something back. A product. An experience. Exclusive access. A reason beyond generosity to say yes.

That shift from pure emotional appeal to value exchange is a completely different cognitive gear. It asks students to think like entrepreneurs. To look at their subject and ask: what is this actually worth, and what can I offer someone in exchange for their belief in it?

That is economic thinking. That is persuasive thinking. That is creative thinking. All wrapped in a format your students will recognize from the internet and have never been asked to produce before.

Jumpstarter: The One-Time Campaign with Tiered Rewards

Crowdfunding webpage mockup with green hills, blue sky. Placeholder text for project details, goal, backers, and days left. Green "Back this project" button.

I love Kickstarter. I've got some pretty cool comics and other collectibles that may not have been found because they never hit traditional retail shelves. So, how can we catch this magic in the classroom? Kickstarter, or as we are calling it in the classroom, Jumpstarter, is a one-time crowdfunding campaign built around a specific project or idea. The campaign has a goal, a deadline, and most importantly, a tiered reward system. Backers get different things depending on how much they pledge.

That tiered reward structure is where the learning lives.

To design meaningful reward tiers, students have to think deeply about what their subject has to offer at different levels of investment. What is worth $5? What is worth $50? What is worth $500? And crucially, what can this particular historical figure, organism, concept, or character actually deliver that would feel valuable to someone who knows nothing about them?

Crowdfunding page with project description prompts. Four reward tiers, each with a "Pledge" button. Support section for pledges.

How to use the template in your classroom:

History: A Jumpstarter campaign for the Lewis and Clark expedition. $10 backers get a hand-drawn map of the proposed route. $50 backers get a personal letter from Meriwether Lewis describing what they will find. $250 backers get naming rights to a geographical feature discovered along the way. Each tier requires students to understand the expedition deeply enough to offer something authentic and period-appropriate.

ELA: A Jumpstarter for Jay Gatsby's West Egg mansion renovation. $25 gets you an invitation to one of his legendary parties. $100 gets you a private meeting with Gatsby himself. $500 gets you a room in the east wing and Gatsby's personal guarantee that the green light means what you think it means. Students have to understand Gatsby's character, his obsessions, and his particular brand of performative wealth to make those tiers feel right.

Science: A Jumpstarter for Marie Curie's radium research. $10 gets you a signed copy of her lab notes. $100 gets you a personal consultation on your own research questions. $1,000 gets you co-authorship on a future paper. Students have to understand what Curie's work actually produced and why it mattered to design tiers that are scientifically coherent.

Economics: A Jumpstarter for a Great Depression-era small business trying to reopen. What does this business offer its community, and at what price point does supporting it become worth it for a neighbor who is also struggling? That question gets into supply, demand, community interdependence, and the economics of scarcity in a way that a multiple-choice question never will.

The template includes space for a campaign title, a project description, a funding goal, a deadline, and at least three reward tiers with descriptions. That last piece is the mastery check; if a student cannot populate those tiers with something specific, authentic, and rooted in the content, the template will tell you immediately.

Teacheon: The Ongoing Subscription

I also love Patreon. I have used it to support comic book artists I love (when I have the extra money), but I mostly support some of my favorite podcasts. If they are going to put in hard work to keep me entertained (especially D and D content!), I want to slide you a few extra bucks. So in the classroom, we can use Patreon, Teacheon in our version, to think about investments differently. Instead of a one-time campaign, it is an ongoing subscription model. Supporters pay a monthly amount in exchange for exclusive access, behind-the-scenes content, and perks that only subscribers receive.

Membership page with three subscription tiers. Each tier includes a customizable name, price, join button, and benefit summary.

The shift from one-time to ongoing changes everything about the thinking move.

A Jumpstarter campaign asks: what is this project worth right now? A Teacheon asks: what is this subject, figure, or concept worth over time? What does sustained access to this world look like, and why would someone keep paying for it month after month?

That question requires students to think about their subject not as a single event or moment but as an ongoing story with continuing developments, recurring value, and an audience that keeps coming back.

How to use the template in your classroom

History: A Teacheon for Benjamin Franklin. $5 monthly subscribers get access to Poor Richard's Almanac — a monthly dispatch of Franklin's observations on politics, weather, and human nature. $15 subscribers get Franklin's personal correspondence, including letters he would never publish. $30 subscribers get an invitation to his weekly salon in Philadelphia, where the real conversations happen. Students have to understand Franklin as a sustained intellectual presence, not just a lightning rod and a hundred-dollar bill.

Science: A Teacheon for a coral reef ecosystem. $10 subscribers get monthly water temperature and bleaching reports. $25 subscribers get behind-the-scenes footage of species interactions that tourists never see. $50 subscribers get direct access to the reef's early warning system, first to know when something is wrong. Students have to understand the reef as a living, changing system with ongoing stories worth following.

ELA: A Teacheon for the narrator of a first-person novel. What exclusive access does being inside this character's head actually offer? What would subscribers get that the general reader of the published novel does not? That question pushes students into the deeper mechanics of point of view and narrative voice in a way that an essay prompt rarely does.

Social Studies/Civics: A Teacheon for a branch of government or a specific policy. What are the monthly deliverables of the legislative process? What do engaged citizens get from sustained attention to how a bill actually becomes a law? Students have to understand the process as ongoing and iterative rather than a single moment of civics.

The Teacheon template includes space for a channel name, a mission statement, at least three subscription tiers with monthly perks, and a sample piece of exclusive content — one actual example of what a subscriber would receive. That sample is the deepest mastery check of anything we have built so far. You cannot fake a genuinely good piece of exclusive content about a subject you do not understand.

The ROI Thinking Move

I want to name the pedagogy explicitly because I think it is worth understanding before you assign either of these.

GoFundMe, Jumpstarter, and Teacheon form a natural progression of persuasive and economic thinking:

GoFundMe asks: Why should someone care? Jumpstarter asks: What do they get in return for a one-time investment? Teacheon asks: What do they get in return for sustained investment over time?

Each one requires a deeper understanding of value, audience, and exchange than the last. Together, they cover a range of persuasive modes that students will encounter throughout their adult lives, from charitable giving to consumer purchasing to subscription culture, and ask them to operate on the producing end of those transactions rather than just the consuming end.

That is media literacy. That is economic literacy. That is content mastery wearing a very convincing costume.