A great way to have some fun and reinforce learning in the classroom (or at home).

Over the long holiday weekend, I made it a point to have some fun with my kids, and the idea came to me to search online to see if I could find a Jeopardy game that would allow me to create my own categories and questions. I found the documents below on the James Madison University web site (thanks JMU!), which let me easily create a Jeopardy game using PowerPoint.

It took a little time to come up with 50 answers and enter them in the templates, but the result (playing the game!) was a lot of fun. It’s easy to envision this being useful and fun in a classroom setting, for students old enough to be comfortable with the “answer and question” format (probably grades 4 - 12+).

Some considerations to keep in mind would include:

• Be a little creative about breaking out of the three-player structure, to let everyone enjoy the fun, or create small groups to create and play their own games.
• Plan how you will simulate the “buzzer” - that is, how you will decide which player gets to respond to each clue first (we went with the first to put up their hand after the question was asked, but there was a fair amount of squabbling over who was first each time, and whether someone put up their hand before the question was finished, etc.).
• Presenting this through a projector would be nice, or on an Interactive Whiteboard.
• Be sure to have a Final Jeopardy question prepared (there is no template for this).

The web page with the templates and simple instructions is here: http://www.jmu.edu/madison/teacher/jeopardy/jeopardy.htm ^[1]. PowerPoint Templates are provided for the ‘regular’ Jeopardy round and for the ‘double Jeopardy’ round, along with some supportive documents.

Go ahead - take a couple minutes to give it a look, and consider trying it in your classroom, it could be fun!

Be sure to stop back early next week as I work to wrap up my series of posts ^[2] learning about Interactive Whiteboards for the classroom.

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