Why?

• Verbal engagement with terms/vocabulary

• Collaborative student interaction

• Familiarity with descriptors/synonyms for terms/vocabulary

• The competitive aspect of a game has potential for overall student engagement

When is a good time to do this?

General Review (examples):

• All subjects: Academic vocabulary or terminology

• Social Science: Significance of historical events/terminology

• Science: Parts of a cell, describing parts of a sequence such as photosynthesis

• Math: Steps in a sequence to solve a type of problem or identification of commonly used formulas

The Game:

• Students will learn a set of terms, and give themselves clues (such as synonyms) to help them to learn the term

  • Depending on your class, this can work well in pairs of students as teams or as individuals.

  • Students will create a set of cards with the term and x number of clues (you decide how many cards, and how many clues you want them to look up)

• An opposing student (or team) will use the player's cards and provide a clue the player added

• The player must guess the term with the fewest amount of clues possible

  • If a player guesses the word on the first clue, they get the max number of points

  • For each clue given, the number of possible points decreases

  • If a player guesses the wrong word/term, they get zero points

  • EXAMPLE: If you want students to provide 5 clues, they get 5 points if they guess the word on the first clue, 4 points if it takes two clues, 3 points if it takes three clues, two points if it takes four clues, and 1 point if all five clues are given. Zero points are awarded if they don't guess the word, or guess the incorrect word.

• The team/student with the most points wins the matchup.

Materials Needed

• Create a bank of terms from which students will choose

  • Differentiation: Have all students do the SAME number of terms, or provide an excess number of terms and allow students to choose

• Blank playing cards and Score Cards

  • Here is a Google Slides doc that you can print. Some slides are pre-numbered, and some are blank, use and edit to your own specifications

  • Differentiation: You decide how many clues you want to use per term. Theoretically, if you use 5 clues per card, each term/card should be worth a total of 5 points, you can edit the scorecard as you see fit

  • Differentiation: You decide how many terms/cards they will play. Maybe they only do 5 terms, maybe 7, it's up to you. you can edit the scorecard as you see fit.

• A Tournament Bracket (optional)

  • Students come up with team names (or - individual students create a name they want to use in the tournament)

  • I use https://challonge.com/ to generate free tournament brackets and screenshot the final result, there may be other options out there

  • Here is an example of how I used a Google Slides doc to make the bracket. I can help you to format this so that it is easy to work with.

Procedure (This is very fluid! Adapt to your needs)

PART I (Day 1, this may possibly take 30+ minutes depending on the size of your class)

• Group students in pairs or individuals (you decide)

  • Have teams decide on a team name

  • If you decide to do a tournament bracket, collect the team names to generate the bracket for the next day

• Teams will choose terms from your word bank

  • You decide how many terms they choose from the word bank. For instance, depending on their level, you may have them focus on only 5 terms from a possible set of 12. Or, you may choose to have all students use the same terms, it's up to you.

  • You may decide to create a variety of word banks so that students are working with different sets of words across your class, or have all students work from the same word bank

• Teams create their cards:

  • Write the term at the top of each card

  • Students will look up the term in a text (or online) and find x clues to describe the term. I think 5 is good, but you may want to differentiate to require three clues.

• Teams practice quizzing one another to familiarize themselves with the terms they picked

  • Partner A reads a clue, Partner B tries to guess the term

• Collect the team's cards at the end of the period (ziplock bag?)

PART II (Day 2, this could take an entire period depending on how many teams you have)

• Display your tournament bracket

• One team travels to another team to faceoff, each team always has their set of cards with them

• Team A & Team B exchange sets of cards

  • Team A uses Team B's cards and quizzes Team B

  • Team A can read Team B's cards in any order they want, and they can read the clues in any order they choose

  • Scores are recorded on the scorecard based on how many guesses Team B takes to successfully guess each term

  • Switch and repeat: Team B uses Team A's Cards to quiz Team A

• Determine a winner and update the tournament bracket

Considerations

• What if I have a group of 3?

  • Consider having the group of three work together, and rotate who is guessing/playing so that there are always two playing

  • Or - maybe have all teams be groups of 3?

• Team dynamics - what if in your pairs, one student is always answering and one doesn't?

  • Consider alternating Partner A and Partner B switch off back and forth during the round

  • Allow conferencing so that Partner A and Partner B can come up with an answer together

• How will you handle a tie between two teams at the end of a matchup?

  • Maybe sudden death Team A quizzes Team B on Team A's cards (which might be different, were they paying attention during the matchup?)

  • Maybe best of three - rock/paper/scissors?

• "Home" and "Away" Who goes first? Who travels to whom?

  • I like using "Home" and "Away" - the tournament bracket sorts that out.

  • Teams are displayed on a bracket as top/bottom - designate top as "home" (or visa versa)

  • Decide who goes first - "Home" or "Away"

• Transitions between matches

  • This can be messy as multiple teams are playing, and teams are being eliminated at different times

  • Be ready to manage some chaos (but - "good" chaos")

• What do you want students to do once they are eliminated?

  • Should they keep playing for fun, or do you want them to follow the remaining matchups and listen?

• What if a student misses day 1 or day 2?

  • This is up to you - you can throw them into another group to create a group of 3, or combine with another singleton to make a new pair for the day