An instructor in Engineering recently contacted us to help her set up a Jeopardy quiz for an activity in class. We suggested her to use Jeopardylabs and an online buzzer system, BuzzIn.live.
Jeopardylabs (https://jeopardylabs.com/) is an open source app that allows instructors to create a game that can facilitate immediate feedback and interactions with and between students (in pairs or in groups). Students’ answers cannot be recorded as Jeopardylabs is not integrated within UBC’s Learning Technology Ecosystem, with limited or no access to data. We suggested this instructor to use a sheet of paper with the list of questions for each level (100, 200, 300, 400 and 500), and manually check the names of the students or groups when they would get the right answer or not.
To make this activity more engaging and have students answer the questions, the instructor used BuzzIn.live: https://buzzin.live/
This is an open source tool with no account required. Students need to enter a code to “Join” a particular session online using their laptop of smartphone. We also advised that the students use their first name/last name as username to better track their participation, in case the instructor wanted to know who answered first using a sheet of paper with the list of students.
From a pedagogical standpoint, this Jeopardy activity can allow instructors to integrate a gamified component into their teaching with open source tools with little preparation required.