Image from http://boardgamegeek.com/image/72266/smarty-party?size=original
The rules are simple: I provide a category that describes a list (e.g., Best Picture Academy Award Winners 2000-2011). On their turn, each student (or team of students) has to try to name one item on the list. A student who makes a guess that is not on the list gets a number of penalty points. The sequence of penalty points is 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1 (i.e., the first to miss gets 3 penalty points, the second gets 2, and so on). The round is over when there have been 7 misses or all items in the list have been guessed. The winner is the one with fewest penalty points at the end of the game.
For this game, I prepared a Word document with 5 lists. The colour of the text for the entries is white. When a student guesses an answer, I highlight the corresponding entry and change the text colour to black in order to reveal it. I also printed out the document so that I know which entry is which. Overall, the game took about half an hour.
The success of this game depends heavily on the categories chosen. I did my best to make sure the categories were age- and culture- appropriate because nothing is more boring than a trivia game where you don't know any of the answers, or worse yet, where you get crushed by some know-it-all. Even so, it turns out that not many of my students were movie buffs who knew about the Oscars ("no, the Fast and the Furious never won Best Picture"), so I'll probably replace that category if I run this again.
Because it's the final session for the semester, my objective was mainly to let the students have a good time, so all the categories were somewhat whimsical. I was particularly interested in the students' responses for the Teaching Award Winners category (these are second-year students) because it let me know whom they felt were good lecturers. I think some of the students were genuinely surprised that some of their favourite lecturers never won the Teaching Award. However, this game is one way that you can test the students' recall ability in class. You can conceivably ask nursing students for the warning signs of shock, or chemistry students for the first 20 elements in the periodic table. My advice, though, is to not have the entire game involve serious topics, because after the first couple the students will figure out that it's just a thinly disguised review exercise and lose interest.
For the record, the winners were...I honestly don't remember (any of my students reading this are welcome to remind me in the comments section). What I do remember is lots of laughter amid cries of "you stole my answer!" and good-natured ridiculing of desperate shots in the dark as the obvious guesses were taken. If nothing else, my students now know that the most viewed youtube videos are not necessarily the best ones. :)
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