Week 4 EOC: Jeopardy Game

I think the game is a very effective learning tool for many reasons. To start with, creating the questions is difficult and makes you learn about many topics in the reading because you read a lot while trying to find suitable questions. Figuring out which categories to put the questions in and what value to assign the questions is also challenging.

The game itself forces you to think and remember what you read, and the open book format lets you learn while playing the game. Having the game played in teams, rather than as individuals, is a very good idea as it fosters teamwork and rewards those who work together.

The effect of changing the games before they were finished is to give a greater variety of questions of different difficultly levels. It also lessens the impact of bad questions and allows different people to take on the role of game creators. More importantly, it provides a convenient time to change the teams around.

Switching the teams around from game to game lets people meet other people and prevents any one team from dominating the game by redistributing the good players from team to team.

Varying the size of the teams changes the dynamics somewhat because large teams are more likely to come up with the correct answers. On the other hand, having small teams gives more people a chance to participate, even those who don’t participate normally. However, some people rarely participate, even when they are on smaller teams. They choose not to answer the questions and let their teams lose. Whether this is because they didn’t study, they were shy, or they were just apathetic I don’t know.

The system of giving extra credit for the midterm to people who are on winning teams or who participate is a good one because it rewards the good students. Also this being Las Vegas, letting your team gamble with their points in the last game is a nice touch.

Personally I had a lot of fun in the game. It’s a cool way to study. Creating the questions prepared me well for the game. Being a new student in the school and not knowing anyone, it allowed me to meet most of the people in the class. The teams I was on always came in first or second place and our team’s decision to gamble most of our points on the last game, while the other teams played very conservatively, turned out to be the right one. The reward of all those extra credit points means I don’t need to study much for the midterm.