Holiday Interactive Game Assignment

I have been working with the computer teacher at our high school to take students through a unit on creating interactive holiday games. Here is the page at Promethean Planet where we posted some results.

We started out by showing students how to use basic shapes in ActivInspire to create holiday graphics. This document shows the first images that we used.

After they practiced that for one class period, I showed them how to set the background color, how to use the Text tool and how to copy their graphics with the Camera

Then the next stage was to have them create some holiday slides. Here are the directions that we posted in Blackboard for that part of the assignment. It requires students to create a couple more graphics and then the slides in a flipchart.

I'll post the directions to the first round of simple games and I'll provide some samples in a day or two.

Holiday Interactive Game Assignment - Part 3

The final stage of this project is to create a Christmas or holiday game playable with ActivExpressions or AcdtiVotes. The directions are available here.

Two of the three sample games referred to in that document are available on Promethean Planet. I haven't finalized the third one yet.

• Wits & Wagers - U.S. History Edition
• This or That?

Most students had little trouble transitioning from the second assignment to this final project. Many of them just did a quiz game with multiple choice questions. A few went with very creative games based on random draws and personal preferences. It has been encouraging watching some of them go well above the minimum requirements of the assignment.

I worked with students most days while they finished this project. Additional tips I taught to some students who wanted to use them were:

• Using the Camera tool to take pictures of graphics created in other programs
• Adding the Another Page action to link pages
• Adding the Hidden action to make objects disappear to reveal other objects

I posted some of the best examples of the students' work here at Promethean Planet. 

Holiday Interactive Game Assignment - Part 2

For the next step in this assignment we required students to make a short, simple quiz game with three questions. Two could be multiple choice and the third had to be a number question. The directions we posted for this assignment are here.

Since students were at various points in this lesson on the day that some were ready to start part, I did nothing in the way of introduction other than tell them were to find the directions. I made myself available for questions and I helped them progress through the assignment that way.

We shared the best flipcharts from this part of the project with the elementary teachers. Since we kept them in the district, I allowed students to copy and paste from the internet as long as they cited their sources.

A half dozen good examples resulted from this, but we found students were confused about the differences between putting the questions and answers on the screen versus putting them in the Question Manager. It would have been simpler if the Question Manager worked like I think it is supposed to. As it is, we had questions and choices on the flipchart and we just set the number of options and the right answer in the Question Manager.

One thing I struggle with when making directions is that if I put an example early in the document, students will look at it and just forge ahead without reading the directions. If I don't put a detailed example there, though, they can't always get their brains around what the directions are telling them! I suspect the solution is to grade mercilessly with a clear rubric on all projects until they learn to read directions.

Top Resources in 2011

I started this blog in the summer as a way to highlight some resources I posted on Promethean Planet and to organize some other projects I knew would develop in the classes I'm teaching.

Of those on Promethean Planet, here are my most popular in terms of downloads.

#1: This or That? - This is based on my party game Take Your Pick. Being a great ice-breaker, most downloads for this activity took place in the weeks before and shortly after the start of school, but it continued to be popular for months. I am thrilled that so many teachers took an interest in it.

#2: Oh, Really! Back to School Edition - Obviously based on my Oh, Really! game, this edition was a last minute thought at the end of summer. Like the previous activity, this one took off in those weeks. Due to the title, it hasn't continued in popularity quite as much, but I think it is a great introduction to the original Oh, Really! classroom activity that can be adapted easily for any point in the year.

#3: Wits & Wagers - I'm actually counting the Life Science and U.S. History editions of this activity together as the #3 spot. As such, they actually beat out the Oh, Really! edition for downloads. The simple concept drew a lot of attention and I hope to create at least one more edition of this fun game in the early months of 2012.

As for lessons in class, the Interactive Holiday Game assignment drew more attention more quickly than any other. Some projects ended up on Promethean Planet and one of them had over 400 downloads by the time Christmas break reached most schools in the U.S. It was a lot of fun for many students who created the projects and for others who had a chance to play the resulting games. It also taught me some valuable lessons that I will highlight in my next post.