Quizzes, Games and Interactive activities

A great number of people enjoy quizzes, questionnaires and games in their everyday life. Quizzes don’t have to be used just for assessment purposes but can also be used for drill and practice and for review of content. Interactive activities can be used for learning in a number of ways including:

• quizzes offer review or ‘drill and practice’ activities to re-visit new learning.
•  ‘cool’ way to learn – an SMS quiz uses learners’ familiarity with mobile phones to engage in a learning activity.
• learning games can offer a fun way to engage in and learn about important matters e.g. health and safety information, first aid, food hygiene.
•  Working in pairs to ‘play a game’ improves communication, cooperation and negotiation skills in any language.
• bite-sized chunks of learning can engage fast learners who have completed a class activity or help slower learners who need support and review activities to aid their learning

Any activity, whether home-created or commercially produced, needs to be fun, engaging and be achieved in ‘bite-sized’ chunks and of course have some element of feedback. A recommendation is to create an activity that will take between 3 and 10 minutes to complete. 

The British School of Motoring offer a set of quizzes and questions relating to the Theory Driving Test. Revise or test your theory knowledge on your mobile phone.

In Practice

'The mother of a learner also wants to take her driving theory test as well so they have been working on the quiz together. The tutor commented that this sort of generational link, in her experience, is quite unusual amongst the travelling community. It's an activity that they can work on together.'

Unfortunately Hot Potatoes interactive activities don't easily transfer to a PDA however PocketExam or QuizBuddy offer a range of multiple choice, flash cards, yes/no or single choice activities including image prompts or sound files for handheld devices.

Microsoft Excel can be used to create small sized interactive quizzes for Pocket PCs and Palm devices.

Use the logic function, for example =IF(E3="","",+IF(E3=A3*C3,"Well done", "Sorry, try again")) to respond to the entry in previous cell.

Interactive SMS quizzes can be fun and engage less motivated learners who are not keen to use technology and might see the activity as a 'cool way to learn'. Each learner or group works through a set of questions and then uses the PDA or phone to send the answers by SMS to a dedicated phone number. The learner/s then automatically receives the score and feedback by SMS. Screenshots of an SMS quiz and practical scenarios are available from CTAD (part of Tribal Group).

Go to the BBC's mobile site which a range of purpose-built quizzes and games for mobile phones.  Try the Bitesize learning activities.

 

CTAD (part of Tribal Group) has developed a number of interactive m-learning materials for Pocket PC. The activities include:

• Driving
• Travelling
• Health and Fitness
• Lifestyle
• Number skills
• Word skills

See m-learning in action and try the activities on your computer.

 

In Practice

“I’m trying to combine cookery and basic skills with a Family Learning group so I want to encourage the group to use the PDAs. The classes are usually busy and I see them being used by learners at different times. Handing someone a PDA when they have 5 minutes to spare for example or as people arrive or while others are washing up etc. They can use it to:

• View short 30 second tips taken from www.eatwell.gov.uk
• Work through the CTAD m-learning quizzes on the PDA
• View presentations and interactive activities from British Nutrition Foundation

Family Learning tutor, Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology (GLOSCAT)

Red Kite Learning in partnership with London South Bank University, has developed interactive materials suitable for a computer as well as for handhelds. The suite consists of free, web-based, customisable exercise templates for numeracy tutors.

 

 

If you’re going to make your own PDA web pages use these following suggestions:

• Use 2 or 3 columns maximum.
• The width must be no larger than 220 pixels wide.
• Use Arial, size 10, black for the ‘body’ text attributes.
• Use colour as much as possible.
• Make sure any images are no bigger than 220 pixels wide.
• Why not add animation for fun.

Leonard Low's Blog says 'I like to make a distinction between what I call “transitory” and “destinatory” mobile learning.  There are many resources we can make available in a mobile form which are great for having on an iPod or sticking into a car CD player to learn from while you’re travelling between places (transitory); and other learning resources which may even be inherently dangerous to access (while driving a vehicle, for example) but are excellent resources at a destination - a searchable database of chemical safety data sheets, for example.  Thinking about the way that learners will interact with a learning resource is a useful way of avoiding the creation of a perfectly good mobile learning resource that is never going to be used, simply because it doesn’t fit in with the lifestyle context of its intended learners.

Writing a PDA Friendly Web Site suggests tips and hints how to create web pages for Palm devices.

Quicklinks

In Practice

Using Text

Using Sound

Using Images

Using SMS (Text)

Using MMS (Images)

Using Planning Tools

Out and About

Getting Connected

 

Other sections

 

Choose the Right Device

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Technical Tips

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FAQs for Organisations

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Making it Accessible

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The Future

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Glossary

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