Great American Race Reflection

I decided to add some gamification to Westward Expansion. Students are put into teams and are working to accumulate the necessary supplies for a Westward trip. We are going to have some Side Quest options to earn more supplies, and I have supplies hidden around the school. Supplies include: blankets, food, fire, Guidebooks, cooking utensils, money, maps, etc… However, some of the supplies are a trap. For example, the Donner Party had a bad guidebook that led them astray en route to California. As a result, one of my guidebooks is a trap. Here is my website I put together.

I began the unit today with the Great American Race EduProtocol. “This sounds easy. All we have to do is Google stuff?” – This is usually the quote when I explain the first Great American Race EduProtocol rep. Fast forward to our third rep of the year and the students are asking this question, “Can we have a word bank?” Students quickly learn there’s more to creating clues and researching answers with Google.

My first class I ran a Quizizz, ran a Great American Race, and then a Quizizz again. Here are the Great American Race instructions if you are familiar:

1. Create an index card with a number on one side and a vocab term on the other side.
2. The vocab term is the “answer” and instruct students to keep it a secret.
3. Students had 10 minutes to design their own slide – add the card number to the slide, add clues for the vocab term, and a picture.
4. To determine the amount of clues to add to the slide, I make it interesting and have 1 student roll a dice.
5. As students work, I copy their slides, in order, to a large slide deck.
6. I give feedback as they do this.
7. Then students have the rest of time to figure out the answer for each slide. I give each students (sometimes each group) 1 paper with answer blanks.

Here are the Great American Race slides:

That’s it. The Great American race. In my opinion, though, my first period setup didn’t produce desirable results. Something needed to change. I opened up Explore Like a Pirate by Michael Matera and began the next class with some Graffiti.

Graffiti

Students walked into the classroom and saw textbooks laying on the desks. “What are these Mr. Moler?” “We haven’t used a textbook all year! I don’t like this.” I quickly correct the student(s), “We have used the textbook all year, you just didn’t realize it.”

I instructed the students to look at pages 276-315 – skim and preview. I had them find words they thought were important to understanding Westward Expansion. If students found a word, they had to raise their hand and I had to call on them to go. There were 2 catches:

1. They couldn’t write the same words or phrases on the board.
2. I added a “magic word” – a secret word that could instantly win the person who wrote it some money for their group. (Think of it like the secret word from Pee Wee’s PlayHouse show). The secret word was “Manifest Destiny” and every class had 1 student that wrote it.

Students had 6 minutes to skim and add words to the board. When we were finished, I summarized the information on the board and surprisingly, students listed 90% of the words I had on the Great American Race Cards. I took a picture of each board and added it to the picture to the Great American Race assignment as a word bank. THIS. WAS. AN. AWESOME. ADDITION. TO. GREAT. AMERICAN. RACE!!! Here are the boards:

This was such a fun element to add to the Great American Race. Students wanted a word bank and so they created their own and fun doing it. The Great American Race results were much better with a word bank and the eneggament was tons better as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time a for a Quizizz.