Friday, February 22, 2019

Betting Word Chunk Game

After having played the Word Chunk game (in case you're not familiar with it, check out what Keith Toda and Bob Patrick have written about it) for almost 2 years with students, I recently decided to change things up a bit. The premise is still the same: students are in small teams and must translate a sentence from a recent story that we have read in class. 

Here's how I changed it, inspired by trivia games: 
Each group starts with 10 points. 
Before each question (or when we played, each sentence to be translated from Latin into English), each group decides if they want to bet 1, 2, or 3 point(s). They cannot change their bet after they start working on translating the sentence.
I give the groups 2 minutes to translate. After 2 minutes, I check their submissions. If the sentence is 100% correct, they get the amount of points that they bet added to their score. If they did not, they lose the number of points that they bet. 
For the final question, each group could bet as many points as they had.

Since this is a translation activity, it requires that the students' translations be precise, so it is important that they already be familiar with the story. If students are not familiar with what they are translating, that will just breed frustration when they lose points for an imperfect translation.

My students enjoyed the change and the competitive uncertainty of placing bets. My only concern was what to do if a group ran out of points. In that case, I still let them bet, but I'll need to figure out a way to get around that.

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