How to Foster a Little Healthy Group Competition

One of the teaching methodologies that I am a big fan of is called Gamification. In gamification you take principles, tools, and strategies that make games successful and apply them into a non-game setting in order to hopefully boost its success. For example, you can take the idea of competition between players and apply it in the classroom.

Now, granted, this isn't new ground. After all, teachers have been playing Jeopardy with their students for years. Ah, but what if you took the concept of a Leaderboard and used that in the classroom? And what if you made it a little more interesting by making the competition last a while and have some form of tangible reward? Now your students will really start to pay attention!

Okay, so here's what I do. At the beginning of each semester I randomly divide each class into groups and have them name their groups. Each group has a score that is always available to the students on our course leaderboard (a google chart fed from a google spreadsheet and inserted into a google site). Here is an example of what they see:

Group scores can increase and decrease in several ways. Each time we have a quiz, test, lab, etc. I average the scores for each group and each group gets that number of points. Each time we have a game in class, the final score for each group for that game is added to their group score. Each time a student is absent or tardy, their group score drops. Finally, I give out points for other things that suit my fancy. For example, if a student finds a mistake in the textbook or on our course website, they get some points.

I have groups stay together for 1/4th to 1/3rd of each semester (depending on how many tests we have each semester), and then they are dissolved and new groups are formed. When the groups are about to be dissolved, I announce the winning group, and give each member of that group a small prize that they have picked (usually a $3 thing of candy). It may not seem like much, but a lot of students REALLY get into the competition. Several times I've had students make comments like: "I hate Spanish, but I'll be darned if I don't do my homework so that we can get the homework points for our group!"

And best of all, using the google chart, spreadsheet, site combo is easy and FREE! :D Of course, the candy isn't, but you could always pick some other reward system that is. (My students keep begging me to make their group scores count as extra credit for their course grades. So far I haven't caved.)

Random Sentence Generator using Excel

When my students come up to me to ask how they can practice making sentences, one of the things I always suggest is to just randomly pick some words from the chapter's vocabulary list and make a sentence out of them. Then they can come to me, or go to a tutor, and have the sentence evaluated for content and form. But somehow students seem to think that the process of randomly selecting sentence pieces doesn't make sense. To help them understand the concept I've created the Random Sentence Generator using Excel. There are two versions of this tool. The first generates a list of random words in Spanish that the students should then combine into a sentence, and the second generates a random list of words in English, that the students then need to translate into Spanish and then combine into a sentence. (Here is a copy of a Random Sentence Generator of the second type.) I've used these Random Sentence Generators several times in class and students really seem to like them! They especially have fun when the randomly generated list of words makes absolutely no sense, so they have to get creative! When we use this tool in class I usually provide them with four or five different lists of words, and then give them a few minutes to create their sentences, and finally I have them write their sentences on the board so that we can go over them as a class.

Technical Stuff:
The way the generator works is fairly straightforward. Put each vocabulary category into a single column. Then, use the formula:

=INDEX(Table14[Name],1+INT(RAND()*COUNTA(Table14[Name])))

Example (for a list of words contained in cells A11 through A20):

=INDEX(A$11:A$20,1+INT(RAND()*COUNTA(A$11:A$20)))

to have a word randomly selected from each column each time you refresh.