How to Play Jeopardy in the Classroom
by Rosshalde Pak
Jeopardy is a great game. My grandmother loves it and has been watching it since its beginning. I can hear the soundtrack now…
The primary difference between Jeopardy and other game shows is the variety of categories and levels of difficulty within each category. For example, at the easy $100 level, a category called American Dates in History could have a question like the significance of July 4, 1776. At the $500 level, it would be something more difficult, like the date that JFK was shot, or the date the Supreme Court heard its first case.
In education, the value of having these varying questions of difficulty is that there should be at least one question that each student can answer. And I really love games where I know each student can be both challenged and successful.
To create a Jeopardy game, you definitely need to set aside some time. I would say out of all the game options I recommended in my previous articles, this one takes the greatest amount of preparation. Luckily, once you have it completed – voila – you have it forever. Science and Social Studies units tend to do best with this game. History and the Arts lend themselves to this game too. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do a shorter version for a novel or reading course.
So first, decide what you want the game to be based on. Then start going through your collection of information, see what it is that you already have. This step should take a few hours at least. Look for anything that you want your students to remember. Dates, people, places, measurements, quotes, etc. Once you have thatm start to create the categories that you want to be a part of the game. Try to have at least four categories, but having up to seven or eight works too (again, this depends on how much information you pull). Next, try to see how many questions you could create within each category. Again, here, having at least four questions within each category should be the minimum; you could go up to ten questions.
Once you see what you have already, now you know where you need to fill in the gaps. Some categories are naturally going to have more questions than others, so this is where your teacher research skills come in handy. You definitely need to have the same amount of questions for each category. And don’t forget your 'Daily Double' – a trickier question that your students might not know that is worth double the amount of points!
Now that you have your information ready you can decide how you want your students to play.
- Do you want to do it with a Power Point, or index cards?
- Do you want to have your students play in teams, pairs, or individually?
- Is there going to be a prize? I tend to give the winning team three extra credit points.
- How much time will you give them to play?
I recommend two sessions of 40-50 minutes – again depending on the amount of information you have.
Jeopardy does call for a greater degree of knowledge than might traditionally be found in elementary school. Lots of middle and high school teachers utilize Jeopardy type games. It's great to use as a studying tool before a big test. It also works well for preparing for the end of a unit, midterms, or finals. By playing a game, you get students out of their worried state of studying, you help them to recall and remember facts that they might have forgotten. Plus, this interactive tool allows them to retain the information in a different manner – thereby increasing their chance of success.
Once you have your own Jeopardy trivia game, and you get the chance to utilize it – the next creative step is to actually make it a project for small groups of students to create their own component of Jeopardy, under a certain heading, and have the whole class play together. By letting your students, in groups, create their own Jeopardy game you allow them the chance to create the fun, realize the work involved with it, and give them another way to study and remember.
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This article was written by Rosshalde Pak. She is an Education Entrepreneur based in Portland, Oregon. You can find more of her writings and projects at her blog, Education Shortlist
