I teach A-Level Physics and one of the papers involves students carrying out two different practical tasks. Whilst the practical tasks vary each year, the marking scheme does not. It is based pretty much on process skills students use. This can be quite challenging for students who are used to examinations being about content and coming up with the 'right answer'. As such, I find that getting students to appreciate the different demands and challenges of this paper takes quite a long time.
Other than lots of practice, marking and feedback, one method I have used is to get students to identify the areas that they struggle with and where they make mistakes. They will often make the same mistakes repeatedly, which can be frustrating for all concerned! So, to lighten the mood, and hopefully make the process more open and memorable, I designed this game using prompts I gave MindJoy (an AI chatbot).
The game is based on a round of Family Feud where students have to guess, in this case, "We asked 200 Physics teachers what the top 8 unforced mistakes were, made by students on Paper 3..."
Prior to playing the game. you print out the top 8 answers on a piece of paper (for you to use as the compere). I just press the 1-8 buttons to reveal the answers and take a printscreen before refreshing the page!
The game is designed for 3 teams (Red, Green and Blue). There is a scoreboard so they can see their progress and position. Each team gets 3 guesses. If they guess right, you click on the team's square, corresponding to their answer (using as much dramatic impact as you wish, maybe more as the game goes on!)
Students see the answer, it matches the same colour as the team and they also get the points registered to their scoreboard. As that answer has been guessed, all the other answer boxes are removed.
If they guess wrong, you go over and click on the grey X box corresponding to the Team. A red X appears below their name and 5 points are deducted from the score. Another incorrect answer reveals a second X:
If they lose all their 3 lives they are blocked from answering any more questions. Currently a line goes through Team 1. I thought about removing all the guess boxes but that has proved challenging to do with my prompting:
We've played it a couple of times with different classes and in every case it has worked really well. The competitive element helps and of course, as compere you can add to the excitement and tension. The game took about 20 minutes or so.
The great thing is that in the end, you reveal all the items.
In this game, the list was actually compiled from the mistakes the students make and I have given feedback on, so I was hoping that they were able to recognise them. Working in different groups also meant they could share them and talk openly about them. A biproduct of the game was that they were also talking about lots more errors that could be made in the practical so perhaps by remembering them they might not make the same ones again?
The template is easy enough (although a little time consuming) to change the question and answers and scores..
If anyone has any suggestions for improvements or would like the file, please get in touch and I'll create a template.
