(Note: Figures referred to in the article are not included in this text-only version.)
If you've ever envied those fancy interactive computer games and quizzes, wished there were some directed specifically at your classes, and despaired of having the expertise to create them, weep no more! If you can type (even with two fingers), you can not only create quizzes and games your students will love, you can also effortlessly track how your students are progressing in learning the material you've presented.
All of this is courtesy of one of the best internet sites I've run across&emdash;a commercial site called Quia.com (to be found at www.Quia.com). Quia has taken all the computer-geekiness out of creating games by putting it firmly behind the scenes. You simply decide what kind of game or activity you want&emdash;say, a set of vocabulary flashcards&emdash;type your terms into the template provided, click on the button that says, "Submit!" and voilà! A set of computer flashcards appears, bearing your very own vocabulary words.
And if you don't want to make up your own games and quizzes, your students can still benefit from the many ready-made activities available at Quia. They can choose among games and quizzes made by other teachers in categories that range from English to math to science to foreign languages. My intermediate and GED-level students love this site! Math activities especially are favorites, with students able to practice endlessly in areas they feel weak in, including basic arithmetic, equivalent fractions, matching decimals and fractions, and algebra terms. Even students new to computers can use these activities, which require only minimal mouse movement&emdash;and so are good practice for beginning mouse users.
A math matching game, for example, looks like Figure 1. Students click once on the box with the problem, say 9+1, and again on the box with the answer, 10. If the answer is right, the boxes do a virtual flip-over to display their reverse sides, and the board looks like Figure 2. If the answer is wrong, the boxes do nothing at all. Students can play as many new games of this as they want, or, with the click of a button, they can return to the main page and pick another.
Quia offers a good variety of possible activities already made up: flashcards, matching and concentration games, hangman-type activities, multiple-choice and pop-up quizzes, jumbled words and word searches, and&emdash;the latest addition&emdash;a "challenge board" game that mimics "Jeopardy," with students choosing a category and the number of points they want to try for, and then answering a question of appropriate difficulty.
But for my money, the real fun (and benefit) is that you can make your own activities geared to your own subjects and your own classes. These then have their own URLs, and can be made available to your students alone or to others if you publish the URL. For instance, I put up the GED master spelling list in a series of hangman games; my students or anyone else can find them at <www.quia.com/pages/gedstudy.html>. Students with computers can then use these at home, but I think the best use is still in the classroom. A student may start out alone on this page, but inevitably a crowd gathers to argue actively over spelling. Imagine! Arguing over spelling, talking about spelling rules, reinforcing each other when they finally get the right answer.
And it's simple to do. For all of the Quia activities, the task for the teacher is equivalent to typing information into the cells of a table. On the page for creating a hangman game, for instance, there's one box for a title and another for a description. Then there's a series of boxes for entering terms to be used in the game. For my spelling hangman games, for example, to use the word "advantage" with the definition "a head start," I typed those into the appropriate cells, as shown in Figure 3.
Then I added the other words I wanted in that game. (I generally kept mine to between 25 and 50 words. I divided the list into many games arranged alphabetically). When I finished entering the words and definitions I wanted to use, I simply clicked on the "Submit!" button. My student ended up with a game that looks like Figure 4.
Creating virtually any of the Quia activities is as simple as this. Now, typing all that stuff in for the master spelling list was pretty tedious, I have to admit. How many words and definitions is that? I couldn't bear to count&emdash;but a few evenings with some good music and a dictionary and I was done. And that's all I had to do.
The beauty of Quia is that they have made all this incredibly complicated stuff incredibly easy. Its directions are simple (some students have figured out how to make their own), navigation around the site is straightforward, and whatever you want to create simply happens automatically. I've made up some GED-type multiple-choice quizzes for materials my classes have worked with, for example; it's tedious typing, but then the quizzes are there.
Furthermore, if I choose to set these up as "quiz sessions"&emdash;and Quia has very easy-to-follow instructions about how to do this&emdash;not only can my students get instant feedback on which questions they are answering right and wrong, but I can get reports on how the students do and which questions they miss&emdash;all automatically! Imagine working on vocabulary, for instance, and being able to know with the click of a key or two not only which students were doing well and which were having trouble, but which specific words were giving the class trouble. Imagine doing the same with math or history or geography or...you get the picture.
Naturally, Quia has some limitations. It is subject of course to all the various internet ills&emdash;the net can be slow, servers can be down, and so on. Then I learned the hard way that if you're creating an activity and you accidentally hit "enter" instead of "tab" when you're moving from one field to another, you'll lose whatever you haven't previously submitted. But that's like any creative activity on a computer&emdash;you just have to get used to saving (in this case, submitting) fairly frequently or working with hard copy. (To be fair, though, when I have had any problems, Quia's email technical support has been quick and responsive.) In addition, so far at least the Quia creators haven't come up with matching games that allow more than two matching cards, or that allow many items to match a single answer (parts of speech, for example). And it is a commercial site. When I first discovered it last year, I wondered how they could possibly make money; recently they've answered that question by posting banner ads. But they're fairly unobtrusive, and each one carries a warning that clicking on it will open a new browser window.
But these are small quibbles. In my experience, Quia is a terrific site that allows us as teachers an array of options that can help students be excited about learning. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?
Wendy Quinones has taught adult education in the Boston area for 10 years. A recovering English teacher, she has recently developed an increasing interest in technology as a classroom resource for both teachers and students.