Five Ways to Get More out of Gimkit

published by Mike Neumire on 10/18/2023

Gimkit continues to establish itself as more than a Kahoot duplicate. 

Gimkit is a gamified quiz tool that falls in the same category as Kahoot and Quizizz. Essentially, teachers create sets of questions and answers or terms and definitions, and then students play a game with those questions or terms. The game might look like Jeopardy, Among Us, snowball fights, or a more traditional Kahoot-style quiz. But more and more, Gimkit releases new features and game modes that sets it apart from its peers. Here are five modes and features you should explore. 

5. KitCollab

Designing a Kit in Gimkit (a set of questions and answers or terms and definitions) can be tedious work if you’re starting from scratch. Of course, you can search Gimkit’s large library of Kits made by other teachers and use whole Kits that you find or pull specific questions. You can also easily import sets of questions from other sources, like Quizlet. But the easiest way to design a Kit might also be the most impactful- with KitCollab. KitCollab is as it sounds- a collaborative approach to designing your Kit. When you use KitCollab, Gimkit gives you a link you can share with anyone, allowing them to quickly and easily submit questions to your Kit, no login required. This means that you can challenge students to come up with their own questions. The act of crafting questions is a powerful learning tool in itself. When you pair this strategy with the authenticity of one or more classes playing whole games around those questions, student engagement also increases, and you get better questions. 

4. Draw That

Draw That is another unique game mode that stands apart from the typical Gimkit experience. Here’s how it works: you choose a kit and launch the game mode, and players rotate between the drawer role and the guesser role. As the facilitator, you can have a random player be selected as the drawer or choose someone specifically. Once a player is chosen to be the drawer, they get to choose between three terms. Once they select a term, they start to draw it! While they draw, the guessers can see their drawing live in real time. As they start to make sense of what the drawing might be, they can type in as many guesses as they want. Guessers earn points based on whether they get the answer correct before time runs out, and if they do get it correct, how quickly they do so. As an extra support, guessers can see how many letters there are in the word or phrase, and those letters slowly reveal themselves throughout the guessing window. 

3. Classes

The typical Gimkit experience starts with a teacher launching a game and displaying a join code for students. This is easy but it lacks the benefits of an established classroom space, like reviewing data, tracking assignments, etc. If you want to be a regular Gimkit user, classes might be your best bet. You can create a class in Gimkit, and you will receive an invite link that you can share with students. When they create a free account on Gimkit, they can use that link to be a part of your class. The benefits of this include name validation (so you don’t have to worry about what name they choose to share on a given day), assignment tracking, and assignment progress saving. 

2. This or That

In most Gimkit game modes, students play some kind of video game that incorporates question answering as an engine for accomplishing whatever goal that game establishes, whether it’s earning money, collecting fish, making it to the end, etc. In This or That, there are no questions for students to answer. Instead, there are two spaces- a red side and a blue side. The purpose of this game mode is to give teachers more freedom to facilitate. Teachers can announce any kind of question that has two possible answers. For example, a teacher might say “go to the red side if you think this character’s actions were justified, and go to the blue side if you think they weren’t.” Or they might say “go to the red side if you prefer sweet and blue if you prefer salty.” If they want to stay in the realm of right and wrong, they can also award points at their discretion. They have “5 points for red” and “5 points for blue” buttons that, when clicked, will give five points to any player who happens to be in that space at that time. The teacher also has a freeze button to stop everyone where they are, and a “turn to ghosts” button. The ghosts button would allow for a different type of game goal- who can survive to the end? 

1. Gimkit Creative

Gimkit Creative is the latest bit of genius from Gimkit. The creators behind all your favorite Gimkit game modes essentially pulled back the curtain and gave users all the tools to build our own games! This adds a whole new dimension to Gimkit in the classroom, turning students from more passive responders to more active creators. A teacher might create a quick game mode for their class or challenge students to come up with their own game mode that has specific ties to the content they’re learning at the time.It also connects students a ton of useful coding concepts without actually requiring coding knowledge. 

Gimkit continues to establish itself as more than a Kahoot duplicate. Try these five features out to make the most of the program in your classroom.