The Idea
I am teaching Gravitational Fields to Year 12 Physics. It is our last double lesson of the year, we've finished the topic and I wanted to make a treasure hunt with them as a fun way of reviewing the topic. One aspect of Gravitation Fields topic that is challenging (for everyone concerned) is the idea that Gravitational Potential Energy in space is negative and the biggest amount of potential energy you can have, is at infinity where the energy = 0. This sort of flips common sense on its head. Anyway, that made me think about flipping the Treasure Hunt quiz idea I have used in previous lessons.
Making the Standard Treasure Hunt
You are welcome to have a look through previous blogs to see how I do this. Put simply, I tend to give students a clue which will lead them to a location in school that has a QR code. Scanning this will usually give them an item to collect and a password to unlock a Canvas Quiz with one or two questions. Students have to score 100% and in their feedback, they will get a clue to another location which has a QR code linked to another quiz and so on. I usually have between 8 and 10 clues and quizzes and have different groups starting at different points. I often use the free QR code website - me-qr.com as it includes a range of different items you can make as QR codes:
Flipping the Idea
My flipped Treasure Hunt was made up as follows
- 9 Quizzes, each with 1 multiple choice quiz question (I took mine from the Item bank I had already set up)
- Quiz settings to allow multiple attempts and feedback but NO indication of a correct/wrong answer (see below)
- Adding a short delay to 'penalise' students with repeated wrong answers and perhaps to stop them just guessing and gaming the system
- Each correct answer would give the location of a QR code that when scanned would give part of a further puzzle
- Each wrong answer would also give the location of a QR code but when you scanned it, you were told the answer was wrong
Quiz Settings used
Top Tip!!!
Save time by getting all the settings sorted as you need them and then duplicating the quiz for each event.
Each question was a Physics question that I already had saved in Item Banks eg
After a group submits an answer, they get a cryptic clue to the location of the QR code eg:
The feedback is different depending on the answer you give eg:
When students scan the QR code, they will get one of two answers depending on whether their multiple-choice guess was correct or wrong
Wrong Answer:
Right Answer:
Students had to make sure they kept the correct answers from the QR code as they needed to solve a further puzzle. In this case, the puzzle contained different parts of a formula that made up Kepler's 3rd Law eg T, G, M, 2, 3, 4, π etc.
Students could do the questions in any order, so (by luck) some may have got better parts of the puzzle than other eg a letter rather than a number.
Setting up the Treasure Hunt (After it finished!)
This next section I have added in. I did not do this on the day, mainly because I had the original idea a couple of hours before the lesson. If I were to do it again then I would include all of the following:
I want students to make sure they attempt all the questions rather than make an inspired guess after 3 attempts. To ensure they do this, I would put the quiz questions in a separate module and added a Requirement feature for Module completion. I would also did not set an order, so students could do questions in any order they wanted.
For the Quiz, I just used Score at least and then set it to 0/1, which meant they could get the answer wrong, and it would not stop them from trying to solve the puzzle at the end.
Adding the Puzzle
Rather than get the students to tell me the answer to the puzzle at the end of the lesson, I would create a final Puzzle link in a separate Module probably using the amazing Lockee online digital locks. I would choose a simple Password lock and make sure students did not need to worry about case or spaces or punctuation. I would also add in the page some guidelines for solving the problem:
Confetti falls if they crack the code and some suitable music plays too:
I would embed the lock on to a Canvas Page. I would then place the page in a new module and set the Prerequisite for this to open when students had attempted (successfully or otherwise) all of the previous questions:
Simple Canvas page with instructions and embedded Lockee clue
How the Modules look:
And that is that. Without some of the final section, the students still enjoyed it the activity and worked in groups or 2 or 3. They also rather liked the flip idea too. I am sure with the extra features described above it will enhance the experience.
Give it a go and let me know how things went in the comments....
