Extra credit ideas?

HELLO FELLOW PROFESSORS !
I’m a fairly new full time Microbiolgy professor and need some ideas!

As I’m sure all of you know, students are constantly asking for extra credit whether they deserve it or not.

I like my students to have fun in class and we always have a really good environment and all of my classes, but one thing I can’t seem to grasp is how to offer extra credit.

Some ideas I’ve offered in the past:

- extra credit directly on exams in the form of short answers or questions

-extra credit by completing the end of the semester class survey (though faculty do not like this much)

- extra credit providing me a brief summary hypothesis overall goal, and main findings of a research paper in microbiology (though often out of scope for the students at the two and 300 level and they also just use AI to do it for them)

If anyone has any suggestions of how to offer extra credit in Waze that are fun and creative and maybe avoid AIU I’d love to hear

Thank you 😊