In college, one of my favorite distractions was sporcle.com. Sporcle is a website full of trivia games that categorically range from sports and entertainment to language and physics. While Sporcle is not an expressly educational game, it certainly has certain features and games that provide an educational stimulus if used in the right way. For example, if history teachers want to provide their students with a quiz to gauge their learning, they can simply click on the tab for history games and either choose a random quiz or pick from any number of subcategories that include politics, war, and art. Science teachers also have many sub-categories to pick from. Under the chemistry tab there is a quiz that asks players to name the Star Wars terms that are formed by the chemical symbols of elements.
Sporcle can be a fun way to get students to think critically and gives teachers the option of creating quizzes and monitoring stats of the players. This feature is free, allows you to create up to eleven quizzes per month, and, as I mentioned before, allows you to monitor the stats of your quiz. This could potentially provide teachers with an entertaining way to monitor the learning of their students.
Although Sporcle is not designed to assess higher order thinking, it is a good way to gauge the students' understanding of the basic concepts of a lesson or unit in a timed setting, similar to what they would see on a test. Although the quizzes are not explicitly multiple choice, many of them have the same type of feel in terms of having to guess an answer from a group of choices.
Even if you don't think that Sporcle could be a good educational tool, it is definitely a fun website for wasting a few minutes of time (even though we don't have right now!). Check it out and let me know what you guys think!
Derek, I routinely attend trivia nights that use sporcle and I had never made the connection to the classroom! But, I agree it would be useful for checking understanding in an interactive and engaging way! What would using sporcle look like in the classroom? Would you have the students log on at home or is it accessible via multiple types of devices? Have you found other games that are useful for history? What will students need to know how to do before they play sporcle?
ReplyDeleteI love Sporcle! We used to play around on it in high school all the time when we finished early in computers class. From a teacher's perspective, I believe it would be better used as a priming method/option for students to widen their base of factual knowledge in their free time at home, especially with relevant quizzes with fill in the blank or listing features rather than multiple choice. This also goes along with what we have been reading in 606--a wider base of factual knowledge facilitates deeper memory of information, which Sporcle could then potentially help with.
ReplyDeleteI love Sporcle too!!! I'm glad you brought it up. Unfortunately, I always lose because I can't type well. So, maybe this could also be used in a typing class. It's certainly simplistic and not intended for any kind of critically thinking. But, factual knowledge is the first step! I wonder if making kids look up the answers they missed would be a helpful exercise. They'd probably hate it though, but maybe they'd learn something.
ReplyDeleteSporcle is great! I never even thought about it as a teaching tool. Whenever I play Sporcle it's usually something stupid like pop culture or sports, but your post opened up so many new possibilities. I was actually able to use it today with a student and she loved it. We were working on geography, but I noticed they do have Literature and Language categories so I can't wait to explore and see if this will be a great tool for my students too. If I can't find a good quiz I can also make one for my students, which is an awesome feature. Thank you for pointing out how educational this game can be!
ReplyDeleteI'd never even heard of Sporcle until your post. Now I feel that I must try it out to find out what all the hype is about. It would be great to have a different, potentially educational way to take a break from the rigors of this program and daily life. Thank you so much for introducing this to me. If I like it, I may actually try to incorporate it perhaps in one of my lesson plans as a teaching tool. Thanks again...
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