Articles on How to use Games to Teach Anything!

• PowerPoint Lecture vs TV-Style Game
• Using Games to Teach
• Using Game Formats to Teach Anything
• Make a Game to Review a Lecture
• Not a Dynamic Speaker?
• Wow people at Public Events or Trade shows
• Tracking Game Scores Online - A Case Study
• Using My Game Show Buzzers

Using Games to Teach

People agree games are a great way to review a topic, but what about using games to teach your core educational principals? Absolutely! Here are some tips to accomplish this.

• Define your objective. Make a list of the key teaching points you want to cover.
• Create questions based on your key points.
• Be creative. Questions do not specifically have to cover a topic, they can be used simply as a stepping stone to what you want to teach or review.
• Remember, your key objective is to teach a topic, you are using “fun” to help you achieve your primary objective which is educational.
• Use a game that allows the use of summary points that will allow you to review content after each question.
• Slow down the game. Your objective is different than a TV game show. Theirs is to entertain, yours is to educate. On a TV game show in a 30 minute period they may play 3-4 rounds. In the classroom it may take 45 minutes of longer for one game.
• Read each question prior to answering.
• Your main concern should be more on the content delivery than who wins or looses. The game simply is a different medium to deliver your material.
• Games do not always have to be long. A short game of 4-6 questions, can be a great way to review the key points of a talk or use as a warm up for a presentation.

Make a Game to Review a Lecture.

There is an old teaching adage, "Tell them what you are going to teach them. Teach them. Then tell them what you taught them." Games are a perfect way to close a presentation and review the points you want them to remember. Both game formats will work, but the My Billionaire Game™ is a perfect tool to help you accomplish this. It allows you the flexibility of using 1-15 questions. We suggest using a minimum of four questions. At the end of the presentation, you can play with one, two or a team of players. How you do this depends on how much time you have left, but to keep the game short you want to keep your set up time short. Choosing “volunteer(s)” even before giving your presentation may be wise.

Your next step will be to open the game and play. Single player mode may also be used. In this scenario, the class as a whole is the single player.

Note: Creating a hyperlink from PowerPoint to the Quiz.exe (MQS) or Play.exe (MBG) file in the folder where your game is will make opening the game more fluid. The game will just pop up and start.

Our games are a great way to break up a presentation if you need some type relief in the middle of a talk. Many conference speakers love our products because it allows them to do quick games for review and for fun.

Using Game Formats to Teach Anything.

Have you ever been asked to put together a presentation with little more than a moment’s notice? Or worse yet, you need to develop your presentation quickly and you know the topic is so boring that watching paint dry sounds more exciting? Game formats can help teach or review any topic, but they can also rescue a presenter from “death by PowerPoint”. If done right, many of the suggestions we have provided for you on this website will make your presentations both more effective and entertaining than just using PowerPoint alone.

Remember the game is your outline and your structure to cover your key teaching points. The game will help you keep and maintain your audience’s attention thereby increasing their absorption of the material.

After you have delivered your introductory and opening statements, level-set your audience with some basic information about the key points. You want everyone on the same page of knowledge before you begin asking questions. They should have enough general knowledge to answer a majority of the questions with some percent of accuracy; otherwise they will be made to feel incompetent and may “shut down” during the rest of your presentation.

The next step is to take your key points and use them to create categories in your game. With My Quiz Show® you can create three to five categories with up to five questions in each category. Questions can be formatted as either true/false, multiple choice or open-ended to create dialog among your audience. Images and audio files can be added to the questions to reach the different learning styles of your attendees.

Do you have an existing presentation that could use a lift?

Leverage the good content you’ve already developed in your PowerPoint slides. My Quiz Show® allows you to attach PowerPoint slides to a question to reinforce or expand on your key points.

A game format, as we discussed in “Using Games to Teach”, is a terrific presentation technique to capture your audience’s attention and hold it right through to the end.

The graphics, sound effects and the change of pace from your lecture to interactive discussion all combine to heighten your audience’s attention level. Using a game format ensures everybody comes out a winner. It enhances your skills as a presenter and helps your audience retain information longer after the presentation ends.