I shared the other day about an app based game my students love to play called What’s the Word. I knew I wanted to see if I could make this work as a class review game. Since we have a test, tomorrow, I decided it was the right time to see if it would work in practice.
I created a PowerPoint template that mirrors the look and feel of the game. I also created an example for my students. When I introduced it today, they all got very excited! With my first class, I assigned each group three words and had them work in groups of four. I quickly found that it was not ideal as groups were a bit too large. Thankfully, I had more laptops at my disposal, so I had students work in groups of two completing one word in the rest of my classes. This worked much better.
Since it was the first time we had done this, and I also took the time to show my students how to find images that are labeled for reuse, we did not have time to actually play our game today. However, students did a great job making the game slides. When I do this again, I will have students make the slides one day and spend a second day playing the game. I am not sure how challenging playing the game is, but I do think the process of creating the game slides adds a huge problem solving/creative thinking aspect to our test review.
Below you can see the game we created from our slides. You can also download the PowerPoint template to use with your own students. Please let me know if you have a chance to answer “What’s the Word?”
