Gimkit

Fatima Ouadan and Maria Mateos

Gimkit is an interactive online quiz and game-based learning platform created by students for classrooms. It allows teachers to create quizzes that students answer to earn virtual money and power-ups. Its purpose is to make learning engaging, competitive, and effective through gamified review activities. 

• Target Age: 6th grade.

• Target Language Level: A2.

• Location: Indoors (Classroom).

This activity is planned for a community based school where students work on projects. The school promotes a project-based and cross-curricular approach, in this case being Ancient Rome, which encourages students to connect knowledge from various areas such as language and history. The texts and materials of projects are chosen collaboratively by the teaching staff before the academic year begins, taking into account the students’ level.

The activity designed for this project relies on the ‘’subject’’ of GEP, an hour a week where students introduce CLIL into their curricular activities, in this case, Ancient Roman topic being taught in English. The main goal is for students to use English as a communicative tool while reviewing and consolidating content from Social and Historical sciences. As the school also has great ICT resources, the lesson is planned to incorporate some of them in it, even with new tools. 

The grouping will be organized by the teacher and a website called grouping, forming balanced groups of six, which will be sub divided in pairs. Each group will have to create a question that will be added to a collaborative quiz. At the end of the session, they will play the quiz altogether, being able to test their peers’ challenging questions. English will be used as the main language for communication, both in oral interaction and in reading comprehension tasks. 

• Reception

• Listening to instructions: Can understand basic instructions on times, dates and numbers etc., and on routine tasks and assignments to be carried out (p.58). 

- Production

- Creative writing: Can write diary entries that describe activities (e.g. daily routine, outings, sports, hobbies), people and places, using basic, concrete vocabulary and simple phrases and sentences with simple connectives like ‘and,’ ‘but’ and ‘because’ (p.76).

- Interaction

- Overall spoken interaction: Can interact with reasonable ease in structured situations and short conversations, provided the other person helps if necessary. Can manage simple, routine exchanges without undue effort; can ask and answer questions and exchange ideas and information on familiar topics in predictable everyday situations (p.83).

- Written interaction: Can write short, simple notes and messages relating to matters in areas of immediate need (p.93).

- Mediation

-  Overall Mediation: Can play a supportive role in interaction, provided that other participants speak slowly and that one or more of them helps him/her to contribute and to express his/her suggestions. Can convey relevant information contained in clearly structured, short, simple, informational texts, provided that the texts concern concrete, familiar subjects and are formulated in simple everyday language (p.105).

• Students will be able to use specific vocabulary about ancient Rome.

• Students will be able to use English as a communicative tool.

• Students will be able to use new and English vocabulary to produce sentences and written tasks.

• Students will be able to use the English language in an innovative technological tool that can provide meaningful learning.

• The teacher starts a quiz on Gimkit to use on students as an example (20 min.)

• The teacher creates handouts for students to use during the activity (1h).

• The teacher introduces the website, divides students in teams using Grouper and creates their accounts (30 min.)

• Students get to experiment with the app to get familiar with it and create accounts (20 min.).

• Pre task: The lesson will begin with a refreshing of concepts of Ancient Rome where students will do a brainstorming of words and ideas in order to recall information for the activity(10 min). Then, the teacher will introduce Gimkit as the tool they will be working on and explain its functioning, altogether with giving instructions of the activity to anticipate it for SEN students (10 min). Finally, the teacher will do groups of 6 using the tool Grouper and each team will divide in pairs (approx 4 groups of six with 3 pairs each)(5 min).

• Main task: For the main task, students will receive a handout on a topic about Ancient Rome. In the task, students will have to make one question per pair over the topic they had been given. They will use the handouts to help themselves and they’ll have to discuss with their peer their question (15 min). After that, they will write down their question on the quiz using the link of KitCollab shared by the teacher (5 min.).

• Post task: Once all pairs have added their questions to the quiz (12 questions -  3 per topic), they will play it altogether (7 min). The session will end with a brainstorming as a wrap-up answering questions given by the teacher such as ‘’Did you find the quiz easy or difficult’’, ‘’How many questions did you get wrong or right?’’, ‘’What kind of questions would you put for the next one?’’... (10 min). When asnwering the questions, children will not have a time limit for aswering, so it respects very student peace during the activity.

This lesson is designed so that students can review and consolidate their knowledge of Ancient Rome while using English as the language of communication and learning. The topic itself is familiar to them so they can have the sense of experts in the topic and create an engaging atmosphere while trying to challenge their peers with their questions. The use of digital tools such as Gimkit and Grouper has the aim to engage and motivate students while making the activity more participatory and hands-on while being able to review vocabulary related to a specific topic in a collaborative way. The teacher’s role will be that of a guide and facilitator, scaffolding students’ understanding of both the task and the language, and providing individualized support when needed, especially for SEN students. 

As for the assessment, the teacher can use Gimkit for it, the website offers an analysis of the quizzes that include the percentage of errors and successes, parts where students got stuck the most ... .those information being very useful for teaching feedback. The results of the final Gimkit game will serve as an informal assessment of their understanding of Ancient Rome. Also, it can be used to observe students’ progress on the topic worked on.

Finally, the wrap-up brainstorming allows students to self-assess their learning. By sharing their opinions about the quiz and identifying what they found challenging or enjoyable, they can receive feedback over their performance too.