Deal or No Deal Revision - refined

A couple of years a go I (with the help of Miss Moore) created my 'Deal or no Deal' boxes that I have used in class when exam season hits.
I first used the boxes back when I was a Cover Supervisor and volunteered to run a revision session in the Easter Holidays as part of the school's intervention programme for the GCSEs. You can see this on my old 'GTP reflective journal' blog at http://mrcollinsreflectivejournal.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/revision-deal-or-no-deal-stylie.html

Now, I believe that I do revision lessons pretty well. I am able to find fun and engaging ways to do revision that my classes enjoy and learn from. One of these is my 'Deal or No Deal' revision session.

This year I decided to tweak the session from what I had done previously to make it even better than it had been. This was based on a conversation I had with my HoD about how it could be made better. We had run a joint revision lesson for our year 8 classes earlier in the year before their 'mid-term assessment' and we spoke about a few things that could be improved...

Before I had used SMARTboard and SMARTnotebook I was using a powerpoint file to have the 'Deal or No Deal' board on that I would update as the game was going on. This took time and stopped the session at points to do the all needed updating of the board. So, now that I had SMART to work with I created a board on SMARTnotebook that would allow me to easily swipe away the amounts. Not only this, I also put a question under each amount so that as it was swiped away a question would be revealed that the class would then all have a go at answering, rewards given to those with the correct answer. This made the game a bit more about revision than just opening boxes. Here's how the main 'board' looks like on screen...

 

Whilst the game is going on these questions aren't the only ones the students get to answer. In each player's box there is a question to answer once they (and their box) have been selected in the game. I also give each student a worksheet of 10-20 questions to be answering throughout and after the game has finished. This is how my most recent one looked...

 

 

These questions are then marked and gone through after the game has finished to check understanding and provide more of a particular question where necessary. The 'game' part of the lesson/session only takes up to 40 minutes to do. This leaves the rest of the session/lesson to go through the questions the students have to do throughout the game and those that are in their boxes. All the questions in the boxes are past exam questions too.

 

I feel the revision session using the above format not only engages my students, especially when they see the room set up in two aisles and with the red boxes on top, but it also gets them to answer more questions than they perhaps would if I had just given them a past paper and told them to get on with it. They discuss answers a lot more, work together to try and get the 250,000 prize box, which they are rewarded by accordingly throughout the continuous 'banker' offers - I always get a guest teacher to come and be the banker! I use my 'random box generator' to chose a box at the start of the lesson so all students have a fair chance of 'playing' the game. All other students are manning the boxes on their own or in pairs depending on numbers of students (I only have 20 boxes).